Start with Small Steps

We can often choose a little discomfort now or face a larger problem later. I explore what it means to choose your hard without pretending we can control everything that happens to us. Small actions in health, work, money, relationships, and home maintenance can help preserve future choices. Avoidance Has a Delayed Cost Avoidance can feel rewarding because it gives us immediate relief. The appoint...

I spent a long time feeling as though everyone else had been handed instructions that I somehow missed. One of the first times that changed was when people told me I would not survive college and I decided to figure out how to get there anyway. That shift, from asking what I was missing to asking what I wanted to build, is where this series ends. Catching Up Is Not the Final Goal Closing a gap mat...

Right out of college, I applied for a job I clearly wasn't qualified for. It required a master's degree. I didn't have one. I applied anyway, made it through four or five rounds of interviews, and nearly got it. A parent probably would have told me not to bother. I didn't have that voice, and it turns out that gap may have given me something worth keeping. **What It Means to Grow Up With Gaps** So...

If you grew up with a gap, you know the moment: everyone else in the room already knows what to do, and you don't. No one ever sat you down and taught it to you, it just never got handed over. In this episode of the Gaps We Grew Up With series, I walk through the three tools I've used across my life to close those gaps, books, the internet, and now AI, and why finding a gap and actually closing it...

# The Calibration Friend Do you ever feel like you had to figure out everything alone? I did, and I built this whole podcast out of that feeling, one library book at a time. This episode kicks off a new series about the people who quietly filled in the gaps I didn't even know I had. **Where This Podcast Actually Started** Long before there was a show, there was a girl in a library trying to catch...

Last episode we named the gaps, the things nobody ever taught you. This one is about what happens after you notice a gap: the shame loop that convinces you to stop asking, and why curiosity, not confidence, is actually the way out. IT STARTS WITH EMBARRASSMENT, NOT A FLAW Not knowing something everyone else seems to know isn't a character defect. It's just a gap. But the moment of realizing it usu...

I still remember not knowing how often you were supposed to wash your gym clothes, and genuinely believing I was the only kid in the building who didn't know. That gap, and a dozen others like it, is what kicks off this new series. The Gym Clothes Problem Some gaps in knowledge aren't about intelligence or effort. They're about information nobody ever handed you, and they tend to surface at the wo...

I had this fantasy as a kid of a machine you could strap your arms into that would just do your bicep curls for you while you took a nap and still got fit. Obviously that’s ridiculous. But I realized recently I’d been making the exact same mistake in other parts of my life, just less obviously. This episode is about the difference between a tool that clears space for the work you want to do, and a...

Who’s actually guarding your calendar right now — not who you wish would, but who actually does? In this episode of Start with Small Steps, I break down why nobody else is incentivized to protect your time, your family time, or your own personal goals, and what it actually looks like to hold that line yourself. This isn’t a boundaries pep talk. It’s a practical look at the specific fronts where yo...

Have you ever noticed that some people’s lives just keep circling the same drain, the same money problems, the same blown-up relationships, year after year, while other people who started at the same place, sometimes with worse breaks, quietly get better and better? I dig into the difference this week, and it isn’t luck. It’s one simple, almost bumper-sticker principle that’s so easy to ignore we...

What if every time you try to prove someone wrong about you, you actually reinforce the exact thing they doubted? That’s the trap at the center of this episode — the quiet difference between proving yourself and improving yourself, and why they can look identical from the outside while leading to completely different places. Proving Is Reactive Proving yourself is oriented around changing someone...

What is life if you’re not chasing something? That question runs through so much of modern productivity culture, and I got caught up in it myself — in my own career, I always needed the next title, the next promotion, the next thing. This episode makes the case for a different standard: not an optimized life, but a pretty darn good one. Not all-or-nothing. Piece by piece. The Pretty Darn Good Job...

Most conversations about hard childhoods stop at “it affected them as kids.” Almost nobody asks what happens after — because childhood doesn’t stay contained to childhood. It moves in with you as an adult, and it rarely announces itself when it shows up. In this episode, I walk through Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs): what the research actually found, how it showed up in my own life, and four...

I learned one of the most important lessons of my life from a video game — and it’s not the lesson you’d expect. It wasn’t that gaming is bad, or that hobbies are dangerous. It’s that something can be completely good at the start and still quietly ask for more than it should later on. This week I’m telling the EverQuest story I don’t tell very often, and the one sentence from a friend that changed...

Do you dread small talk, or are you the person who can strike up a conversation with a total stranger in the checkout line? Either way, this episode is for you. Small talk gets dismissed as fluff — empty chatter about the weather before the “real” conversation starts — but it’s actually doing something important: it’s the on-ramp to every deeper connection we have. Why Small Talk Isn’t Pointless S...

“Ignore your teeth and they’ll go away.” It’s an old joke that isn’t really a joke — and today I’m using it as a doorway into something bigger: the idea that your life isn’t just built by what you add to it. It’s also shaped by what you quietly stop tending to. Neglect Has a Direction. We tend to think of not doing something as a safe, neutral choice. It isn’t. Teeth are the clearest example becau...

You know what a five-minute task looks like when a kid doesn’t want to do it? An hour-long standoff. Socks on the floor. Full dramatic collapse. And the worst part is, that kid is also missing out on the thing they actually wanted to do — playtime they could have been having — because now they’re in a battle that didn’t need to happen. Sound familiar? Because I do it too. Not on the floor, not wit...

I used to think something was wrong with me. I’d sit there knowing a task mattered — knowing it mattered yesterday, last week, last month — and still couldn’t get myself to move on it. For years I asked myself the wrong question: why isn’t this getting done? The better question, it turns out, is what does my brain actually need to get started? That question changed everything, and it’s where SPARK...

I have played the performance review game for my entire career. And I have been playing it wrong. Not wrong in the obvious way — I wasn’t making things up or padding my resume. I was doing something that felt like humility and was actually closer to inaccuracy: describing real, significant work in the smallest possible terms, handing my manager a vague document, and then wondering why I didn’t fee...

Have you ever committed to something — really committed — and then felt the pushback start almost immediately? The friction, the doubt, the voice in your head saying maybe this wasn’t meant to be? I used to think that was a sign something was wrong. I’ve learned to read it differently now. Pressure Is a Privilege The reframe starts here: pressure is not a punishment. It’s a privilege. Father Mike...

Have you been quietly waiting for something to happen before you start the life you actually want? A better time, the right number on the scale, the right person, more money in the bank — something. In this episode, I want to talk about what I call the knight in shining armor myth, and why naming it out loud may be the most important thing you do this week. The Knight Isn't Always a Person We were...

There are seasons for steady, daily effort — and then there are moments when incremental progress just makes things worse. This week I'm talking about something that surprised even me: the idea that sometimes, the most useful thing isn't a small step. It's a big one. The Garage, the Trees, and the Difference That Matters I cleaned my garage this weekend. And planted a tree garden. Both projects ta...

Have you ever had a brilliant idea — something you were genuinely excited about — and then done absolutely nothing with it? Or gone all-in on a goal, white-knuckled it for a few weeks, and then watched the whole thing collapse? I’ve been on both sides of that. Today I want to introduce you to a single, practical skill that changed how I approach almost everything in my life. It’s called iteration...

This episode has been a long time coming. Not because it’s trendy — it isn’t. Not because it came from a book I was reading. But because I keep watching it happen to people I care about, and maybe it’s happening to you too. Today we’re talking about the quiet kind of giving up. Not the dramatic exit. The slow drift. The Physical Therapy Analogy It starts somewhere specific — a knee replacement, a...

You said yes. And now you have that sinking feeling. The committee, the favor, the project that just got added to the pile — you agreed, you were kind, and now you're wondering what you're going to give up to fit it in. Most of us have been there more times than we can count. The problem isn't generosity. The problem is that we tend to think of saying yes as additive — just one more good thing on...