The Last TEP (#118): When the Means Become the Mission

In TEP #103, I wrote about being a sucker for polished visions of change.

This is a sequel—but also an ending.

There’s another way to be a sucker.

It doesn’t start with believing something false.
It starts with doing something you once had good reason to believe might work.

Writing. Teaching. Building online courses.

At some point, those were means—ways to improve real outcomes.
But over time, the means can become the work itself.

And when that happens, you stop asking the only question that matters:
Is this actually producing results?

I’ve been writing these newsletters for a while now (since TEP #001 in September 2022).

They’ve helped me clarify how I think.
They’ve resonated with many of you.

But that’s not the standard.

When I apply the same rigor I’ve argued for—focusing on outcomes, not narratives—I can’t confidently say this work is changing behavior in a way that leads to better results on the problems we care about.

That doesn’t make it worthless.
But it does make it insufficient.

And if I’m serious about effectiveness, “insufficient” is a reason to stop—or at least to change.

This isn’t just about newsletters.

It’s a pattern across the field:
We take something that might work as a means—strategy, collaboration, storytelling, learning—and gradually treat it as an end in itself.

We stop evaluating it.
We keep doing it.
We assume it must matter because it feels aligned and sounds right.

That’s a quieter form of being a sucker.

Part of this decision comes from seeing the limits of the usual paths—nonprofit work shaped by funding cycles, philanthropy with distance from outcomes, and policy environments pulled more by ideology than results.

That doesn’t make them useless.
But it does make them harder places to consistently produce impact.

So I’m going to spend some time exploring what it looks like to work differently—closer to the problem, with tighter feedback loops, and a clearer connection between effort and outcome. Skin in the game.

No big announcement. Just a higher standard.

So I’m going to stop writing TEP.

Not because I’ve run out of things to say.
But because I’m not convinced this format is the most effective way to do the work I care about.

If that changes, I’ll revisit it.
But for now, this is the last one.

Before I go, I’ll leave you with the ideas that still hold up for me:

• There are no total solutions to complex social problems—only trade-offs.

• If something claims to work without cost or downside, look closer.

• The goal isn’t to sound right or feel aligned—it’s to improve outcomes in the real world.

• And the hardest discipline is continuing to test whether what you’re doing actually works.

Thanks for reading.
Thanks for thinking through these ideas with me.

If any of this has been useful, I hope it shows up not in how you talk about problems—but in how you work on them.

I’ll end with a question that still feels worth asking:

Where might something you’re doing—something that once made sense—now be operating on autopilot? And what would it look like to evaluate it honestly?

Keep resolving.