Most people don’t have a motivation problem, they have a follow-through problem.

We start fast, chase new ideas, and convince ourselves we’re making progress. But the real gaps reveal themselves later when things get repetitive, when the excitement fades, when no one’s watching. That’s where most people fall off. And it’s exactly where everything that matters is built.

This week’s issue is about closing that gap.

We’re talking about grit, not as a personality trait, but as a set of decisions you can control. We’re digging into how your cravings, focus, and discipline aren’t fixed, they’re trained by what you repeatedly do. And we’re breaking down how to actually keep what you read, so it shows up in your life instead of disappearing by next week.

Nothing here is complicated. But it does require something most people avoid - staying in the work long enough for it to change you.

If you can do that, even just a little better than before, you separate. Let’s have a week

Grit gets talked about like it’s some rare, born-with trait. It’s not. You, reading this newsletter, can develop it yourself starting today.1

At its core, grit is sustained effort over time toward something that actually matters to you. Not motivation or even discipline. Just the ability to keep showing up when it’s inconvenient, boring, or uncomfortable.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth (Author of the book non-ironically titled “GRIT”) built her career studying this. What she found wasn’t that the most talented people win, it’s that the ones who stick with things the longest do. Effort compounds. Consistency separates.

You’ve felt this in your own life.

The weeks you trained when you didn’t feel like it. The projects you stayed with after the initial excitement wore off. The moments where quitting would’ve been easy, but you didn’t.

That’s grit. And it’s trainable.

The alternative is what most people live in: cycles of intensity followed by drop-off. New goals every month. High-energy starts, quiet finishes.

The biggest lesson Duckworth has unearthed in all of her studies on the topic is that we can isolate our ability to develop grit down to one single hemisphere of the brain - the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC). In low-grit individuals, this region of the brain that evaluates effort, pain, and difficulty, recognizes discomfort and sends a signal to quit. High-grit individuals weren’t born with this ability - they exposed themselves to voluntary difficult tasks that over time rewired this response system in their brain to encourage it to push through.

A grit-driven life looks different by necessity. You have to have fewer goals. But more follow-through. Less noise but more depth. You stop chasing the next thing and start becoming someone who finishes.

And that changes everything - your body, your career, your confidence. Because you start trusting yourself as someone who can persist. Someone who can finish.

If you want to build grit yourself, start here:

1. Pick one hard thing, and remove the escape routes.
Not five goals. One. Something that requires effort over weeks or months. Then decide ahead of time: you don’t quit when it gets uncomfortable. Make it attainable, but a stretch. Provide evidence that you persist, and you finsih.

2. Set a non-negotiable baseline.
Not your best day, your worst acceptable day. Maybe it’s 3 miles. 30 minutes. One page. This is what you do no matter what. Grit is built in the floor, not the ceiling.

3. Stay when it gets boring.
This is the real test. Not when it’s hard, when it’s repetitive. When nothing feels new. Most people leave here. If you can stay, you separate.

The most successful people I know aren’t the smartest. They’re just relentless and stay in the fight longer than everyone else, and they always see things through. This is something you can develop for yourself, should you choose the hard path.

If you’ve lived anywhere but under a rock for the last 3 years, you’ve probably become accustomed to the terminology “food noise.” Anyone not living under that rock, you’ve certainly heard that tightly associated with the rapid growth of GLP-1 drugs. One of the underlying truths about GLP-1 drugs is that they didn’t invent appetite control, they just exposed something your body has been doing all along.

“Hunger,” cravings, and food noise aren’t random. They’re signals shaped by repetition. What you eat consistently becomes what your body expects, and eventually, what it prefers.

There’s real biology behind this. Highly processed foods light up dopamine pathways hard and fast, training your brain to seek that same hit again. Over time, your baseline shifts. Meanwhile, your taste receptors adapt to the level of sweetness, salt, and fat you regularly consume, meaning the more intense your diet, the duller whole foods can feel at first.

But the reverse is also true.

When you consistently eat simpler, whole foods, your taste sensitivity recalibrates. That same chicken, rice, and vegetables that once felt bland start to taste… good. Your gut hormones (like GLP-1) begin responding more predictably. Blood sugar stabilizes. Cravings quiet down, not because of willpower, but because the signals themselves change.

I lived this during bodybuilding prep.

For weeks, my diet was as repetitive as it gets - chicken, rice, eggs, vegetables. Early on, I still wanted junk. But something shifted about 3–4 weeks in. The cravings dropped off. Not suppressed, but actually gone. Sugar-free sauces started tasting just as good as the real thing. Fast food stopped calling my name.

Not because I became more disciplined, though through the process I certainly did. But because my inputs changed long enough for my system to adapt.

That’s the part most people miss. They try to “eat clean” for a few days, still feel cravings, and assume it’s not working. That Walden Farms zero calorie sweetener tastes like metal to the person used to their 130 calorie ranch tablespoon. In reality, they just haven’t stayed in the environment long enough for the rewiring to happen.

If you feel like you battle this food noise epidemic, I encourage you to try this five step system to very literally rewire your taste buds and craving systems:

1. Pick 3–5 anchor meals and repeat them.
Don’t rely on variety. Build consistency. Same breakfast. Same lunch. Rotate a couple dinners. Familiarity is what retrains your signals. It also makes it immensely easier to consistently hit macro targets.

2. Remove hyper-palatable foods temporarily.
Not forever, but for now. The goal is to lower the intensity of your inputs so your baseline can reset. It won’t take as long as you think.

3. Use “bridge foods.”
Things like Greek yogurt, fruit, or zero-sugar sauces. They help you transition without feeling like you’re eating bland food all day. Try low calorie spices too.

4. Give it 2–3 weeks minimum.
This isn’t a day-to-day change. It’s cumulative. Stay consistent long enough for your body to catch up.

5. Pay attention to the shift.
Cravings don’t disappear overnight, but they do fade. And when they do, everything gets easier.

You need consistency long enough for your body to remember that when it’s hungry, it’s just that. I’ve lived this third person with the birth of my son. He certainly lets us know when he’s hungry. And he gets milk every time. He hasn’t been exposed to anything else, so his craving system hasn’t strayed from that one food. You have evolved, but you can retrain your body and mind to do the same.

I’ve read a lot of books that made me feel smarter in the moment, and then disappeared from my life a week later. It’s been a recurring theme for my approach to this new year - understanding the why behind picking up a book, rather than just to check off another numeral on my reading goal for the year. And when I put it down, how will I ensure it gets put to use? That action is taken?

Ryan Holiday in Wisdom Takes Work makes a simple point - reading isn’t the goal. Extraction is. If you’re not turning what you read into something usable, it’s just entertainment dressed up as growth.

This three-step framework that stuck with me is straightforward, but it forces you to slow down and actually keep what you read.

First: Annotate and wait.
While reading, underline, write in the margins, flag anything that hits. Then close the book and leave it alone for a week or two. This part matters more than it sounds. Most ideas feel important in the moment. Very few still matter after time passes. The delay filters signal from noise.

Second: Create single-idea notes.
When you come back, don’t review everything. Only pull out what still feels relevant. Then write each idea on its own card (or note). One idea per card. No stacking. No paragraphs. Just the core thought, isolated.

Third: Include three things.
Each note needs:

That last part is the difference. If you don’t connect it to your world, it won’t stick.

I’ve started doing this, and transferring the thoughts to a running Google Doc, and it changes how you read. You’re not passively moving through pages, you’re looking for ideas worth keeping. Worth using.

Over time, you build a small library of thoughts that actually belong to you. Not because you read them, but because you processed them, challenged them, and decided they mattered. And this, as the book is titled, is where knowledge is transferred to wisdom. And it’s wisdom that guides us over the long haul.

Most people read more and still feel stuck. This is how you read less, and actually change.