We’ve reached the end of the Expansion Community 2-Week Sprint. Two weeks ago I set one non-negotiable - in bed by 10pm. It’s my 2% Rule, the small thing I control that moves the other 98%.
At the midpoint checkin I told you it was working. Six nights out of seven cleared yay!
Then week two happened…
I missed my 2% three nights - Wednesday, Friday, Saturday - and woke at 3am one night and 1:30am another for no reason at all. I won’t hand you the laundry list, but every missed night had the same shape: a day packed wall-to-wall with lunches, meetings, and socials, then me walking in the door buzzing and reaching for the old fix - TV, food, scrolling, a little Amazon cart therapy.
My oldest habit, answering overstimulation with more stimulation.*
Saturday was the clearest version. I was helping a friend set up a renegade pop-up concert, and when the security guard rolled in at 10pm to shut us down, nicely actually. It’s called Renegade for a reason ;) I was still so wired from the day that I didn’t land in bed until nearly 2am. The vices come back when I’m tired and my social cup is overflowing.
Was it worth it? Absolutely - I mean just look at what we created ☝️
But it also reminded me that my pattern of overstimulation and self-sabotaging behaviors is still alive and strong. It’s why the week felt bad, even though a lot of good happened inside it.
A couple of the other nights I made the best of. Tuesday I woke at 3 and couldn’t get back to dreamland, so I got up to meditate, ran to the calisthenics gym, and rolled into the cafe by 6am to edit and publish the Tao Te Ching Verse #8 video. Friday I woke at 1:30am, got up, worked until I crashed again around 5am, then dragged through the next day like a zombie.
Made it work, but would not recommend.
*I also drank boba tea after the concert. Stupid, in hindsight. Self-grace applies to the dumb stuff too.
Funny timing: this was Verse #8 week, the water verse. I’d distilled water down to four ways of being: humble, gentle, honest, and adaptable.
Looking back, three of them held. Humble, gentle, honest showed up in how I spent the week.
But adaptable? Water taking the shape of whatever container it’s in, including time - is the one I flunked. The 2% is a test of adaptability, and week two I couldn’t take the shape of my own 10pm container because I was overflowing socially.
Here’s the turn. On Sunday I sat down and made my Last Week Map, the hand-drawn one some of you saw on the livestream*. It did what it always does: it showed me the week my tired self couldn’t feel.
Because underneath the “I failed my sleep goal” story was this.
On Monday, I drove forty minutes to swing by a friend’s weekly gathering and walked in, by complete accident, right as they were celebrating his birthday. On Wednesday, I had lunch with a friend who’d just been laid off, and what looked like a gut-punch turned out to be an opening, a real chance to finally leave the corporate world for the industry he’s wanted for two years. Right after, I called another friend in the middle of a hard family stretch and just stayed on the line. That evening, I reconnected with old friends at Casa de Luz, and one of them, now running a new cafe that opened there, offered the venue up, for free, for my next Sunset Stories open mic. That same renegade concert that cost me Saturday’s sleep, I strung the lights and framed the camera angles so they could get the word out about it.
I worked out four of five days and meditated three of five. Meditation especially was a cornerstone to keeping me present and reduce inner resistance.
None of that shows up on a sleep tracker. All of it is what the week was actually for.
*The Last Week Map tutorial video will be published this week. Stay tuned.
Two things worth naming because they’re the real lessons from this Sprint.
The first is something I keep teaching and, it turns out, keep having to relearn: the difference between what I call S1 and S2 suffering (from Verse #7).
S1 suffering is the unavoidable hit: I missed my 2%, the night’s already gone, nothing to be done about it. S2 suffering is everything I pile on top: the self-judgment, the spiral, the little story about how I’m undisciplined and blew the whole sprint.
Here’s the part I keep forgetting: S1 is maybe 20% of the pain. S2 is the other 80%. It’s the only part I really have a say in. I can’t always dodge the slip, but I can usually choose not to multiply it. So this time I tried to just let S1 be S1 - I missed, I noticed, I got back on the wagon the next morning.
And just left it there.
The second is harder, and I’m still sitting on it. Somewhere in week two, pouring into people stopped being water flowing and started being water spilling. A river runs from the spring down to the ocean and back up again as rain - no purpose, no destination it’s forcing, just water being water. That’s giving when it comes from your nature. But you can also dig ditches and divert that same water somewhere it was never headed, and call it generosity.
The signal, I think, is the feeling: the moment the giving starts to feel like effort, like trench-digging, that’s the sign to look closer. My cup overflowed because I kept pouring past the point where it was still flowing. So the practice now is catching when the cup is full and setting the pitcher down, without giving any less of myself when it actually counts.
Keeping: the 2%. It 100% earned its place. Good sleep didn’t just make me effective, it made me enjoy everything more. Meditation stays, as the foundational practice.
I’m also going to keep pouring into the social cup, because connection is what this whole second half gave me. However, I will be more selective with who I hang out with and what events I go to - that’s why the Last Week Map is so revealing.
Cutting: the vices. The excess streaming, snacking and the Amazon spiral. That and the big, loud, packed events.
I tried a downtown Austin yoga thing this past Tuesday, sat in a tiny park while the crowd swelled and the DJ kept climbing louder, and slipped out ten minutes before it even started. Biked over to a low-key open mic by the lake instead, caught the sunset with a few friends, and felt completely at home.
I’m an at-the-lake guy, not a packed-park guy, and I’m glad I stepped outside of my comfort zone to discover that.
So here’s where I land. By the old scorecard, week two was a failure. I missed my number three times and indulged every vice I’ve got. By the scorecard that actually matters, it was one of the fullest weeks I’ve had in a long while. The week felt bad and wasn’t. That gap, and the map that closes it, is the whole reason I do this.
That’s post-productivity, as best I can live it right now: the 2% works, and the real practice is the negotiation around it, guarding the small thing that widens my cup while pouring out the rest without spilling.
If you sprinted alongside me these two weeks, this is your retrospective too. Drop yours in the comments:
🥳 What went well? (and really celebrate it guys)
😥 What didn’t?
🤔 What can you improve?
🚀 What do you want to continue?
🙅 What do you want to stop?
And we’ll close it together, live. Our retrospective workshop is this Wednesday, June 24 at 8am PT. Come reflect out loud with us. Details and RSVP here.
We did less talking, more doing. Most importantly, more being.
See you Wednesday, my friend.
-S
p.s. On one of the days I woke up early, I made a cool new candle :) fun frivolous things are sometimes the point.
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