In the last decade, I’d guess that I’ve interviewed well over 1000 people as a writer and podcast host. (I only forgot to turn my recorder on one time — during an interview with the psychologist Martin Seligman, who was very gracious about it — and was hung up on only twice: once by Mike Tyson, once by John Daly). It is one of the great joys of my work that I’ve gotten access to an incredible list of smart, creative, and interesting people.
Since I was smack in the middle of my twenties and looking for guidance when I started talking to these smart, creative, interesting people, I began to wonder if they might have smart, creative, interesting ideas about what makes for a well-lived life: how to get things done, how to manage noise, chaos, and uncertainty, what success or happiness really looks like, and on and on. So I started asking—and haven’t really stopped since.
Below are some of the answers that have most stuck with me.
Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and a popular meditation teacher, stressed the importance of learning how to find the “space that opens up” between the things we feel or think, and the ways we react to those things.
“There is an incessant inner dialogue that goes on, but you don’t have to believe the story. The people I see that start a [meditation] practice and have the most benefit, they’re getting that as a takeaway: ‘I am not my thoughts. I don’t have to believe my thoughts.’ And that is the beginning of freedom.”
This isn’t just metaphorical freedom. You’re actually interrupting the neural circuitry that’s been hard-wired to keep you alive by constantly scanning for threats.
“Every time you have an anxious thought, it gives a message to your body to tighten that up—if you can see those thoughts and instead of fueling them, just take a few breaths and reconnect with what’s right here, you’re interrupting the entire habit of anxiety. You have the option when you interrupt it to create new neural pathways that are actually more creative and more intelligent and more open-hearted.”
Reflecting on it now, her comments make me think of the brain as having its own algorithm. In the same way that digital algorithms serve you more of what you like based on what you browse, watch, or listen to, your cognitive algorithm gets trained on whatever you find most engaging—which makes it all the more imperative to find a way out of anxiety, rumination, and worry.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. One helpful technique Brach uses to create some psychological space when her thoughts become really loud, anxious, or self-critical is to imagine someone else is saying them to her.
“If somebody else was whispering into my ear all the nonsense that my brain comes up with, I wouldn’t put up with it for a minute.”
As someone who has spent more than 30 years as an underwater cave diver and photographer, Jill Heinerth knows the importance of managing anxious thoughts (she once got stuck diving inside an iceberg on Antarctica). But the lesson of hers that stuck with me was about something else entirely: the power of taking the next step towards something that feels right, even if you can’t see with complete clarity where it might be headed.
For her, that meant quitting her cushy corporate job and following her intuition to become a diver.
I was in my twenties making the most money in my life, even to this day, in advertising… I moved to the Cayman Islands with a suitcase full of dive gear, thinking, “OK, I’m going to have to learn how to be an underwater photographer now.” I had dabbled, but I had no formal training in underwater photography. And the best way to become an underwater photographer is to just start doing it. I had the confidence that I could just take one step towards what I was really dreaming about.
It’s really hard to solve huge problems in life. It’s really hard to figure out how to solve global climate change. It’s really hard to figure out how to become the CEO of the company. It’s really hard to figure out how to become a cave diver that makes a living. Those are too big. It’s really big to figure out how to survive when you’re trapped in an underwater cave, and the line is broken, and you can’t see and your buddy’s panicking, and she’s stuck, and everything’s gone wrong, and you think you might die.
But, in all of those cases, we always know what the next best small step is towards survival or success. Life is just a series of those small steps in the right direction, before they build up and turn into something really fantastic.
The most important thing I got from James Clear was this idea that we don’t rise to the level of our goals so much as fall to the level of our systems. The key, then, is not trying to make yourself “better” or “work harder” or “more ambitious,” but to build systems that default you into the desired behavior.
“The results are not what we need to change—it’s the process behind the results. And it’s the habits and systems that naturally lead to those outcomes that is the more effective place to direct our time, attention, and energy. True long-term thinking is goalless thinking. Goals are about winning this instance of a game. Systems are about continuing to play the game. And I think any master, whether it’s in sports or elsewhere, has this deep commitment to continuing to play the game.”2
In the age of the over-optimized routine, Ezra Klein, who writes a column and hosts The Ezra Klein Show podcast for The New York Times, offers a refreshing perspective.
“When I was 28, let’s say, I had a lot of opinions about routines. I was big into optimizing my routine. I’d get up at exactly this time and do exactly this thing… and then I had children. They have their own opinions about my routine, which are different than mine.”
Klein—who, by all accounts, gets plenty done—was helpful in introducing me to the idea that a better day, both in terms of quality and productivity, might come from exerting less control rather than more. He gave up on the idea of a “tightly managed” day, and shifted instead to thinking “less about habits, and more about fundamentals.”
“Nowadays, there are four things that are gonna decide if I have a good day. Did I sleep enough? Did I connect deeply with people I love? Did I get some time to myself? Did I make choices for my body that felt good—like, did I take a good walk, did I eat healthy, did I exercise? If I get those four things in place, usually my days are pretty good. The more they begin to fall apart, the worse everything else gets.”
Klein says that his earlier obsession with routines was really an attempt to try to secure a lasso of control around what is naturally uncertain, and uncontrollable. It’s not just that daily practices are more achievable (rather than rigid routines that often rely on ideal conditions), but that they can help create an internal environment that can handle external chaos.
“I’ve been forced out of the illusion of control. I'm much more interested in the question of, what can I do to make it likeliest that I can meet the situations I'm in with a better rather than worse version of myself—and a more present rather than a more distracted form of my attention?”
Jenny Odell’s wonderful book How to Do Nothing destabilizes some long-held, societal ideas about productivity and its link to self-worth. So I asked her what metric she uses to know if it’s a “good” or “successful” day.
“One thing that is important to me is: was there a time in the day when you were fully aware of the fact that you’re alive? Were there even five or ten minutes where I was able to drop out of the stream of productive time? A lot of time it’s just closely observing something. If you’re really lost in observing something, you lose yourself. You’re just very aware of that thing and those are moments where it’s like, “Oh right, this isn’t just the same day over and over again. This is today. It’s one of a finite number of days I will be alive.”
She also dismantled this idea that productivity should proceed on a clean, linear timeline, saying that her creativity works much more like a tree, where it’s doing a lot of dormant, unseen work “and then, suddenly, the buds open.”
“The majority of what I consider writing happens when I’m not in front of my computer. I consider the part where I’m sitting down to write as transcription. So that ‘writing’ part, the part where the ideas are becoming organized and congealing, that’s like gardening. You can have some sense of the shape of that process, the ingredients that you might need, and the conditions. I know what those are, but I cannot make that proceed in a way that I want to. It has its own rhythm.”3
Mostly known for her work as a sex and relationships therapist, Esther Perel offered some great points on the societal imperative to “be happy,” which can hold us hostage these days.
“Happiness used to belong in the afterlife. In Heaven. People suffered when on earth, especially good Christians, so that they could maybe be rewarded later. This is the first time in history that you ask Western parents what they want for their children, and the first thing they say is, ‘I want them to be happy.’
The tyranny of positivity is a burden. Happiness is an outcome, not a mandate, because the mandate of happiness makes you constantly have to wonder, ‘Am I happy? Am I happy enough? Could I be happier? Should I leave this relationship? I’m happy, but maybe I could be happier somewhere else.’ So it becomes, how do I know? And then it becomes massive uncertainty, massive self-doubt.
Happiness comes in a moment, where I finish an interview with you, or you with me, and maybe we say, ‘That was really good. I’m happy. I’m glad. I’m pleased.’ And then off we go. it’s a moment. It’s not, ‘I am happy in my life. I’m a happy person.’ I’m a person with a range of emotions.”
The really interesting point Perel made following this is that she believes the rise in anxiety, depression, even the overuse of the word trauma is a “mirror response to the pressure on happiness.” We feel so pressured to be happy, that when we’re not we think something is fundamentally wrong with us, that we must have some sort of pathology rather than just being, as she said, “a person with a range of emotions.”
Since we began this collection of quotes with meditation teacher Tara Brach, it’s appropriate to end with George Mumford, a performance consultant employed most famously by legendary NBA coach Phil Jackson, and whose mindfulness-based teachings helped both Jackson’s MJ-led Bulls and Kobe-led Lakers to three-peats (the Bulls in ‘96, ‘97, and ‘98, and the Lakers in ‘00, ‘01, and ‘02).
Much like Brach, Mumford believes in the power of “managing the moment” by navigating difficult thoughts, feelings, or sensations. But it’s what he said about winning—or more precisely, what’s more important than winning—that I found most surprising (particularly given all of his aforementioned winning).
We can’t let people tell us who we are. And they will. They wanna tell you who you are, what you should do, what you should be. That’s your job. Your job is to be you. The privilege of a lifetime is to be yourself. Authenticity is more important than winning. And people will say, well if you win, it makes you feel [good]. Okay, but that shit don’t last. Then you gotta do it again. When you’re feeding the ego, you’re looking for validation out there instead of giving it to yourself.
I want to be clear: this isn’t to suggest that winning doesn’t matter. Rather, it’s meant to suggest that the best way to win is to be yourself and go all the way in on that (a theme we come back to on the podcast all the time). Jordan and Kobe didn’t become two of the greatest players of all time by doing anything to appease anybody else. They were completely and unapologetically themselves, and they played that way.
When our craft or performance is an authentic expression of who we are—our goals, ideals, and values—rather than something that we’re doing because of some external factor (redemption, pride, validation, coercion), then we come to it with the type of intrinsic motivation that drives consistency, discipline, exploration, play, and joy—all factors that will lead to peak performance, which, in turn, will make you the ultimate competitor.
And the second part of Mumford’s answer about the impermanence of winning returns us to Clear’s words about the master’s “commitment to continuing to play the game.” As far as there exist any answers to life, this might be one of them: find something that allows you to be yourself, and see that in showing up for it over and over again, finding joy in the doing, even as “wins” accumulate, they won’t nearly deliver the satisfaction or contentment of realizing that all this work has helped you become more yourself.4
All of the GQ links will be paywalled without a subscription, but, in case you aren’t familiar with this sneaky little workaround, you can access them in an Incognito or Private window. I’m flabbergasted this still works in 2026.
Clear is talking about the important difference between a finite and an infinite game, as laid out in James P. Carse’s book, titled (wait for it) Finite and Infinite Games: A finite game is about succeeding or failing to achieve a goal; the infinite game is about the process of who you become in the pursuit of that goal.
Ezra Klein said something very similar: “Often what makes me ‘productive’ has nothing to do with things that would make me look productive from the outside. Taking more quiet walks leads to me having better ideas for columns and podcasts. They don’t come from grinding out my to-do list. They come actually from creating space in my mind. Spending a lot of time with people I love is obviously good on its own terms, but is just necessary for me to be in a place where I could show up in a conversation and be grounded in myself. So I think that there’s a way in which we have developed cramped, linear metaphors for not just what makes a good life, but what helps people create things in their life. I’ve become very disenchanted with that thinking over time.”
I’m not a religious person, but as I was writing this, I came across this incredibly apt line from the Gospel of Luke: “If you’re content to be simply yourself you will become more than yourself.”
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