“Are you happy?” If you’ve ever read Fahrenheit 451, you might remember when Clarisse asks Guy Montag this question early in the book, and it more or less ruins his life.

I know the feeling.

I am not happy. I don’t wake up happy. I wouldn’t call myself a happy person. I wake up stressed, to be honest. I have legit anxiety-related ailments. Stress rashes. Did you know that was a thing? Stress rashes! But lately I think I am something beyond happy. I am fulfilled. I feel more complete than I have in a while.

There’s nothing quite like hanging your own shingle. So many plates spinning. But goddamn, it feels good too.

In my old life, I was an owner. One of the big bosses. But I was also the third man down, and the top two were not the kind of people you’d want to work for. They were... difficult human beings. The company felt it. It was rough. Toxic. I was stifled at almost every turn. I was also, I think, mostly asleep. The role was comfortable. It came with all the usual dopamine wins. Easy to stay.

But now, despite the struggles that come with building something new, I am awake. Fully awake for the first time in a long time. Learning, driving, helping, making a difference, and profoundly appreciated for it. But it might be something better.

So this week, let’s talk about the two kinds of happiness, why one of them keeps you asleep, and how the other keeps you awake at night but in the best way possible.

Aristotle Gonna Aristotle

You guys up on your ancient Greek philosophers? In case you aren’t, my guy Aristotle kinda figured out this whole happiness thing about 2,300 years ago.

He said there are two kinds of happiness, and we keep using the same word for both, which is sort of like calling a Kit Kat and a steak “dinner” and wondering why you’re still hungry.

The first kind is hedonic happiness. Hēdonē in Greek. Pleasure. Hence the word "hedonist," which should give you a clue where this is going. It’s the dopamine hit. A good meal, a funny show, a glass of wine, a scroll through your feed when you should be doing literally anything else. It feels not terrible. But it also disappears the second the buzz wears off.

It’s not nothing. It’s just rented.

The second kind is eudaimonic happiness. The literal translation is something like “good spirit,” but he didn’t mean it as a mood or a vibe. He meant it as a way of being. A life that’s actually pointed at something. Doing work that matters. Using what you’ve got. Being useful. It is not a feeling that happens to you. It is something you just do.

It is a thing that is earned, not given. Aristotle thought you couldn’t get there without sacrifice and effort, which is why most people don’t really gravitate toward this. It’s hard.

Hedonic happiness is cheap. Eudaimonic happiness is expensive. And they both more or less feel like happiness from the inside, which gets confusing.

Aristotle said you can’t actually know if your life was eudaimonic until it’s nearly over. You only get to look back and see if it added up to something. Not a great afternoon. Not a fun summer. The whole arc of your existence. We live, we die, and the wheels on the bus go round and round. That’s the whole shape of a life. Aristotle was just asking the obvious question. While the wheels are turning, what’s the ride for?

But if your happiness disappears the moment the pleasure ends, was it ever really happiness, or just a feeling that wore the same name?

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The Comfortable Coma

Hedonic happiness is great. Until it isn’t.

A comfortable life with regular dopamine wins is a real thing. The job is fine. The paycheck clears. The weekend has a plan. There’s a show to watch and a thing to look forward to and a snack in the cabinet. Nothing is on fire. You aren’t sad. But it is also possible that you also aren’t really living.

And this is the trap. Don’t get me wrong, life is hard enough, we all need comfort. Comfort is fine. But comfort is meant to be a break, not a residence.

I can say this because I lived in it for years. I had a title that mattered. I had a paycheck that worked. I had wins on a regular enough basis that my brain, my soul, stayed quiet. The leadership team was difficult, the company was rough, but I had built a routine that gave me just enough small hits to keep the bigger questions off my desk.

And pretty much the whole time, I was asleep. I was in a comfortable coma. Not in pain and not really all there. The job wasn’t always that way, but it devolved over time. I didn’t even know I was asleep. That’s how good a coma can feel.

I think this is why so many people describe a quiet emptiness in lives that look, from the outside, completely fine. But something is missing, and they can’t name it. They reach for another drink. Another scroll. Another...something. Hoping the right combination of small pleasures will eventually add up to a feeling of meaning.

Aristotle would tell you it won’t.

The Sleeper Has Awakened

If you’ve read this far, you might be thinking well no sh*t Sherlock. Cause yeah, I suspect most people know this. You don’t need me to diagnose you. But I suspect you might wonder what you can do about it.

That’s the harder problem.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with the Japanese concept of ikigai. Loosely translated, it means “a reason for being.” It’s that thing that drives you. It sits at the overlap of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what someone will pay you for. I’m not going to do justice to ikigai here. It deserves its own piece. But I bring it up because the framework points at something I am finding to be true: a meaningful life isn’t just one thing. It’s a confluence of a lot of things, lined up just right.

You don’t need ikigai today, but you do need a starting place. If you’re trying to figure out what waking up looks like for you, start here:

• What are you actually good at? Not what’s on your resume. What do people come to you for? What could you do a TED Talk on, or at the very least, what could you riff on for ten minutes without notes?

• What does your corner of the world actually need? This isn’t always obvious. It takes a working layer of awareness, but it helps to pay attention to the areas where you keep wanting to fix something.

And one more, this one a bit more from Aristotle than from ikigai:

• What matters enough that you’d keep doing it even when it costs you? This is a bit of a litmus test. Hedonic happiness ends when it stops being fun. Eudaimonic effort doesn’t. If there’s something you’d keep showing up for even on the hard days, there’s a there there...as they say.

Your version of waking up probably won’t look like mine. It might be the side project you keep almost starting. The conversation you keep almost having. The thing you keep telling yourself you’ll get to “someday.” Waking up doesn’t always require a leap. Sometimes it just requires a step.

But it does require a step.

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In Conclusion

Not too long ago I would have told you that I was happy. Or at least that I had a close approximation of happiness. And from the outside, the life looked like a life.

But I was Montag, before Clarisse (and without all the book burning).

Look, I’m not telling you to blow your life up or anything. Hedonic happiness is a thing. We all need the show, the snack, the long lazy weekend, the dumb pleasure of a thing that asks nothing of us. Comfort is a gift.

But don’t mistake comfort for happiness. A life made entirely of small pleasures will feel okay for a long time, and then one day, someone you barely know will ask if you’re happy, and you won’t know how to answer.

So this week, try asking yourself the question. Honestly. Out loud if you have to.

Are you happy?

And if the answer is no, or you aren’t sure, or you just can’t answer, don’t panic. Just sit with it. The question doesn’t need an answer this week. It just needs to be asked.

Cause remember that hedonic happiness fades. Eudaimonic happiness endures. And oftentimes people spend a life choosing the wrong one.

Ever Forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

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I used to go to a lot of these. I’d show up, mingle, trade LinkedIn profiles, learn, chat. I had it down. I had a whole spiel about me, what I did, why I was there.

Then my life got rearranged, and I more or less stopped going. I mean sure, I’ve been to a couple. But when I show up, I’m awkward. People ask what I do or who I am or what my deal is, and I stammer something about dipping my toes into the waters of consulting. Or teaching people about AI. Or that me and a team have started building apps for clients. God…I’m dull.

My whole vibe was filled with kinda this and sorta that. No narrative. No confidence. No sense of identity.

People smile. They try to engage. Then they peel off. I was just another schmo talking about tech consulting and AI. I didn’t want to listen to myself talk. Why would anyone else?

So tonight, I’m going with purpose. I’m a man on a mission. And that mission isn’t to drum up more clients. Or get more people to follow me on social media. Or to promote my newsletters or my business.

My mission is to show up powerfully.

So this week, let’s talk about showing up powerfully, why it matters, what it actually looks like, and how you can do it too.

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The Room Shapes You

When I show up weakly, I am not just losing the room and the people in it. I am losing myself.

When I think back to heading home after one of these events. The story I told myself was “I’m still figuring it out.” “I’m not really a consultant yet.” “Maybe I’m in over my head.” I believed the weak version of myself because I had just spent an hour plus performing it.

I’d never really understood imposter syndrome before that. But I get it now. Imposter syndrome isn’t a feeling that drops in from nowhere. It’s actually something you rehearse. Every stammer, every “kinda this, sorta that,” every hedge is practice. You’re practicing being the person who doesn’t quite belong. Do it enough times and your nervous system files it as the truth.

I was worried about then in teaching my first AI class.

I’ve never shied away from a stage. I’ve run workshops. I’ve spoken at conferences. I like talking to a group. But a 10-week course was different. I was the teacher now. The one to fill in the gaps on an emerging, ever-changing technology. To handle the curious and the skeptical. Aaaaand, I felt like an imposter.

But I know enough about teaching to know students can smell fear. They latch onto doubt and pick you apart with it.

So when I walked into that first class, I wore a mask. I played the part of the expert. The scholar. The guy who had this.

But a mask worn long enough stops being a mask.

A few weeks in, I wasn’t playing the expert. I was the expert. Not because I’d learned more in three weeks, but because I’d stopped rehearsing the doubt and started rehearsing the authority.

I think a lot about the law of attraction. Not the overly woo-woo version. The practical version. What you claim about yourself in public becomes the baseline your brain defends. Say “I’m dipping my toes in consulting” and your brain spends the next week collecting evidence that you’re dipping. Say “I run a consulting practice focused on AI readiness” and your brain starts building that case instead.

You’re telling your nervous system what to look for. You are training yourself to think differently about yourself. You are showing up powerfully.

So the real cost of showing up weakly isn’t when people peel off. It’s the rep. You leave every room a little more of whoever you rehearsed being.

Which Brings Me to Carlo

Remember the movie La La Land? (God I love La La Land). There’s a scene early on in the movie where Mia wanders into a Hollywood Hills pool party, A-ha playing on the speakers. Her roommate grabs her to introduce her to a guy named Carlo. Carlo is a writer. Actually, Carlo says he has “a knack for world-building.” Carlo has a lot of heat right now. Mia quickly escapes to the bar.

Hours later, Mia is stuck in the valet line and who’s right there next to her? Carlo. My guy is still going. This time he’s pitching a re-imagining of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, from the bears’ perspective. There could be a fourth bear. We don’t know.

We’re supposed to laugh at Carlo. And we do. He’s a blowhard. He’s self-important. He’s every L.A. party guy you’ve ever wanted to avoid.

But each time I watch La La Land (and believe me, it is a lot), I love Carlo more and more. Carlo is the only person at that party who knows exactly who he is. Sebastian is playing keyboard in a band he hates. Mia is about to apologize for working at a coffee shop. Carlo has a franchise. Carlo has the bears.

He is showing up powerfully. He understands that life has to be a little nuts sometimes. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together.

This is Jeffrey Pfeffer’s third rule of power, from his book 7 Rules of Power.
Appear powerful.
Which sounds like advice for con men and politicians until you realize what it actually means. People don’t have time to verify you. They read you. Your posture, your pace, your pitch. They’re making a call in the first thirty seconds, and the version of you that doesn’t believe your own pitch is the version they pass on.

What Carlo does right is he commits. He doesn’t hedge. He doesn’t say “I’m kinda working on a thing, it’s sorta a bear thing, we’ll see.” He says there could be a fourth bear! Carlo is gold.

Yeah sure might be a tool. But Carlo knows what he is about. And the dude is punching above his weight at this party and doing just fine.

Appearing powerful isn’t about volume. It isn’t about ego. It’s about conviction. It’s about not leaking doubt onto the person across from you. Carlo leaks zero doubt. That’s the whole move.

So tonight, when someone asks me what I do, I’m not giving them kinda this, sorta that. I’m going to say: “I run Narrow Gauge Consulting. These days, we help people who feel left behind by AI.” And then I am gonna ask them a pointed question about AI and see if they have anything to say.

I’m actually pretty excited.

What I’m Doing Tonight

Showing up powerfully isn’t just a mindset. There are for real moves you can make. Before I head out tonight, I am gonna game plan. Here’s what it looks like for me:

• Arrive on purpose. Decide why you’re there before you walk through the door. Not the surface reason. The real one. Tonight I’m not there to drum up clients or hand out business cards. I’m there to be a version of myself I actually want to be. When the why is clear, the body follows. You walk in differently when you know why you came.

• Have a sentence. One sentence about who you are. Say it out loud in the car. Say it twice. You need to hear yourself believe it before anyone else will. For me. I run Narrow Gauge Consulting. That’s me baby, I run that! If you can’t say it in one sentence, you haven’t figured out who you are yet, and the room will feel that before you open your mouth.

• Stop leaking. The hedge. The nervous laugh after your own sentence. The “but I’m still figuring it out.” The over-explanation when someone nods. Every one of those is a little leak, and the room reads leaks. Pfeffer’s point about appearing powerful isn’t “add confidence.” It’s “stop giving away the confidence you already have.” You don’t need to be louder. You need to stop apologizing.

Three moves. Let’s see how it goes. I’ll report back.

Oh and yeah, I write this other newsletter every dang day about AI. Check it out:

The AI Morning Minute

One AI term or concept, explained every morning in about a minute.

By Derek Pharr

Conclusion

I am sure that tonight will be a little awkward. Get enough tech people together with name tags in a bar somewhere and no small amount of them are just lost on their phones mid-conversation. It’s not exactly the Oscars.

But for me, that’s kinda the point. Showing up powerfully isn’t just a skill for the big rooms. It’s a skill for the small ones. The Monday meeting. The coffee with a friend. The mirror in the morning. Each one is practice. Each one is a little promise to yourself about who you’re becoming.

So pick one room this week. Any room. Walk in like you know why you came. Have your sentence. Stop leaking. See what happens on the drive home.

Channel your inner Carlo. I’m convinced that guy is the real hero of the story.

Ever Forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

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We’d go to the field almost every Sunday. Just the two of us. Rain or shine. A bag of about 40 frisbees.

My daughter would pick up a disc, back up a few feet, and launch it as far as she could.

Ultimate frisbee has this thing called a Pull. Think of it like a kickoff in football. Each team has seven players on the field, and one person on the defensive line throws the disc to the other team. They throw it as deep and as high as they can so their teammates can sprint down the field and pin the opposition before they can get moving.

In high school, my girl played with some of the best pullers in the country. She was on a mixed team and a couple of the boys had turned this into an art form. She knew this could be a superpower for her. She’s strong, focused, has amazing technique. And she knew that with enough work, she could be the kind of player who changes a game with a single throw.

So each weekend we’d trot out to a field or a park or the street and she would practice. And it paid off. She now plays for the UW team and anchors their D line. She pins opposing teams deep while her teammates race down to cover. Time and time again, her throws have forced panicked, rushed decisions and turnovers that led to easy scores.

And when I see that happen, I think about those afternoons. Fielding discs, chasing plastic, refilling the bag so she could keep throwing.

There is real power in getting your reps in. In stacking enough attempts that you start to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what happens when you try something a little different. Reps give you room to experiment. To fail small. To adjust. And eventually, to be ready when the moment actually shows up.

So this week, let’s talk about reps, why the best way to get better is to get busy, and how to start stacking the experience that prepares you for the moments that matter.

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Go Find Your At-Bats

For the last several months, I’ve been working with a startup out of Colorado. Great guys doing really cool work. I believe in what they’re building and I think their product is going to matter.

We meet every week. During the week I put in a few hours of work. Anything from helping with mission and purpose statements, to testing and QA, to go-to-market strategy, to tech stack conversations. And on and on. It’s been a lot of work.

And I have made all of zero dollars doing it.

Which is honestly insane. I lost my job a few months ago. I need the money. I’ve burned through my emergency fund. I’ve been somewhat living off credit cards. Volunteering my time is not exactly what a financial advisor would recommend right now.

But it has been one of the best investments I’ve made in a long time.

These guys love me. And since I’m unpaid, anything I do, like anything at all, adds value. They are genuinely grateful for my perspective and my input. And they’ve become something of a professional sandbox for me. I’ve tried out different frameworks and approaches with them. Some land. Some not so much. But it doesn’t really matter because we get the gift of figuring it all out as we go.

And how great is that? We don’t have to have it all figured out. I’ve been able to create this safe little world where I can learn and contribute and everybody wins. So say yes to things that might not make sense on paper. Pro bono work. Side projects. Favors for people you believe in. And treat every single one like it counts.

Reps Compound

Consider this story from the book Art & Fear. A ceramics teacher splits his class in two. One half will be graded on quantity. He’ll bring in a scale on the last day, weigh their pots, and dole out grades by the pound. The other half will be graded on quality. They only have to make one pot all semester, but it has to be a great one.

Spoilers: the quantity group produced the best work. The quality group sat around theorizing about what the perfect pot should look like, and the quantity group was heads down making pots. Tons of them. Bad ones, lopsided ones, then eventually slightly better ones, then good ones, then a few great ones. Every pot taught them something the next one got to use.

That’s the great thing about putting in the work. Each attempt teaches you something that makes the next one more valuable. The lessons stack on top of each other and the curve gets steeper, not flatter.

Which is why lately I keep saying to anyone who will listen, go stack those reps! Cause the free hours I’m putting into the Colorado startup aren’t just helping them. They’re sharpening instincts I’m bringing into paid client work. A go-to-market conversation I had with them last month gave me a framework I used with a client a couple weeks later. A messaging exercise we ran together showed up in advice I gave a different founder over Zoom. And it’s not like this was planned out. I don’t have some master roadmap here, I am building the plane in the air. But it works out and just kinda happens because the work was live and my brain was paying attention.

And these skills don’t just stay in their lane. Something you practice in one corner of your life shows up in a totally different corner a while later. The patience you build coaching your kid bleeds into how you handle a difficult colleague. The writing you put in on a personal project (like say a weekly newsletter) makes your project emails more concise and interesting. The hard conversation you had with your kid might prepare you for the one you’ll need to have with a client.

Make Your Reps Count

So this is all well and good, but how do you actually do this? There’s a difference between mindlessly repeating something and stacking the kind of practice that actually builds you. John Zeratsky, who helped invent the design sprint at Google Ventures, breaks it down into three things every real rep needs.

1. A clear goal. You have to know what you’re trying to do. Not in a corporate-OKR (god I hate those) kind of way. Just enough that you can tell whether the attempt worked. My daughter’s goal on those Sunday afternoons wasn’t “be good at frisbee.” It was “throw this disc 60 yards and have it hang in the air long enough for my teammates to get downfield.” Specific. Measurable. Honest.

2. Feedback as you go. You need to know what happened. Did the disc fly the way you wanted? Did the client respond to the new framing? Did the workshop make sense to the room? Without feedback, you’re not stacking reps. You’re just stacking guesses. Sometimes feedback comes from another person. Sometimes it comes from your own honest self-assessment. Either way, you want the truth (even if you can’t handle the truth) so make sure you make it happen.

3. Another try, right away. I know, this might feel exhausting. But a rep without a follow-up isn’t really a rep. It’s an experiment with no second trial. You learned something, but if you don’t get to use that lesson on the next attempt, the learning dissipates. The reason my daughter got better is that she didn’t throw one disc and go home. She threw the next one. And the next one. And the next forty. Her arm was often very sore the next day.

Put those three things together and the practice starts to do its real work. Without them, you can put in years and barely move. With them, six months can make you almost unrecognizable to your past self.

Oh and yeah, I write this other newsletter every dang day about AI. Check it out:

The AI Morning Minute

One AI term or concept, explained every morning in about a minute.

By Derek Pharr

Conclusion

I spent last weekend in Portland watching my daughter and her team compete. And almost every time she held the disc and let it fly, I thought about those weekends at the park. Literally hundreds of hours and thousands of throws.

It’s easy to wonder if the work is worth the effort.

Trust me, it is.

A few months into working with that Colorado startup I mentioned earlier, the founders introduced me to someone in their network. That introduction turned into my biggest client of the year. I didn’t take the unpaid gig because I was playing some long game. I took it because I believed in what they were building and I wanted the reps. The referral was a nice little bonus on top of it all. Or, perhaps that was just part of the plan. To do good work, to learn, to grow, to impress, and then jump on an opportunity when it arises.

That’s kinda how it works. You don’t stack reps for a specific payoff. You stack them because the work is the point. And then one day, when the moment actually shows up, you realize you’ve been getting ready for it all along.

So go stack yours. One day you’ll be standing on your own sideline, watching something you quietly built years ago do exactly what you hoped it would.

Ever Forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

P.S. A quick ask before you go.

A member of our Seattle community, Anna Le, has been missing since Sunday, April 5. She’s 21 years old, 5’6”, about 160 lbs, with dark brown eyes and hair. She was last seen in the Brighton neighborhood of Seattle wearing a black t-shirt, dark denim jeans, and white and blue Nikes. She was driving a silver 2010 Toyota Highlander, license plate ACE8577.

Her family and friends haven’t been able to reach her. If you have any information about where she might be, please call or text her family at 206-225-9367 or 206-778-6227.

If you live in the Seattle area, please share this. A post, a repost, a text to a friend. You never know whose eyes might land on the right detail at the right moment. Thank you.

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I’m running a 90-minute online workshop on April 8th called Making Sense of AI.

It’s for people who keep hearing about AI, suspect they should probably understand it better, but haven’t found a starting point that doesn’t feel just completely overwhelming.

I teach this stuff every week at North Seattle College. This upcoming session is the same straightforward approach: normal human language, live demos, actual answers about costs, limits, privacy, the whole shebang!

$50.00 for the class that runs on Wednesday, April 8th. 10am Pacific.

REGISTER HERE

FYI: That link takes you to my consulting website, don’t worry that’s me!

OK that’s it, back to your upcoming weekend.

Ever forward,
— Derek

Dear reader, this week I am offering you something a little different than what I usually do. No intro with a personal tale. No sections with behavioral psychology. No closing that sums it all up with something actionable. No Rob Reiner quote hidden somewhere in the text. This week, I just wanted to write and see where it took me. I hope you enjoy... though there might still be a Rob Reiner quote in here somewhere.

Mr. Tanner was a cleaner from a town in the Midwest...

Do you know this song? It’s from Harry Chapin. You know, the “Cat’s in the Cradle” guy. The one that makes every dad cry at least a couple of times a year.

But “Mr. Tanner” is a different kind of beast. It’s about a dry cleaner named Martin Tanner, of Dayton, Ohio, who had this beautiful baritone voice. He sang while he pressed clothes. He sang at local shows. Everyone in town told him he was gifted. That he should do something with it.

So he did. He saved up, went to New York, and performed at Town Hall. And, well, the critics destroyed him. Or more specifically, “full time consideration of another endeavor might be in order.” Just, wow.

And he did. He went home. He went back to cleaning coats. And he mostly stopped singing. Except late at night, when the shop was dark and closed, he’d sing softly to himself while sorting through the clothes. His music didn’t die, but he hid it. And maybe that is fine, but it kinda sucks that he felt he had to.

I think about this song often. Truth be told, I haven’t listened to it in decades, but it comes to me, unbidden. Not because my singing career was derailed by harsh critics and not because I am particularly good at cleaning clothes. And I’ve never even been to Ohio.

I don’t know why this song visits me in some Dickensian kind of way. And honestly, that bothers me.

At times I think it’s a cautionary tale.
Don’t let other people decide your fate.
Don’t give your power away.
Don’t let the critics choose your path.

Other times I think it might be about hidden talents and the fragility of dreams.

And still other times I think it has something to do with resilience. Like, do I resent Martin Tanner? Is he a warning or a mirror?

I’ve turned it over and over and I could never quite land on an answer. But this week something finally clicked into place.

It’s not the critics. It was never the critics.

Yeah, I resent Mr. Tanner.

Martin Tanner was already happy. And somebody talked him out of it. He let himself be talked out of it.

Go back and listen to the song. I never got the sense that he was an unhappy cleaner. He had a life. He had a gift. He had recognition from the people around him. He sang while he worked. The man was fine. He wasn’t settling or running away or giving up. He was content.

And somewhere along the way, he was talked into the insatiable need for more. His friends, his neighbors, the people who loved him, they looked at a content man and said “you should want bigger.” But why?

Don’t get me wrong. I am all about pushing your limits and testing the edges of your boundaries. But I also think that being content with who you are and what you have is profoundly underrated. Stories are told and movies are made about the underdog who overcomes all odds and finds fame or wins the day or saves the world. But life is rarely like that. Life is a series of meaningless profound moments that can lead to contentment or dissatisfaction. And it grinds my gears that Martin Tanner let himself be pushed into something he likely didn’t want in the first place.

So why am I ranting about a fairly unheralded song from the early 70s instead of following the normal Chief Rabbit format we all know and love?

I think it is because sometimes I am overwhelmed by the excess of it all. The constant pressure to drive, thrive, do and be more. I felt compelled to defend contentment. To be its champion.

Maybe it is a by product of getting older, but I think that you have a better chance of finding peace and happiness in the small things. The quiet moments that you don’t tell people about and that don’t make for good stories.

What is wrong with singing to yourself as you clean clothes? Or whatever that looks like for you. Why does everything have to be more all the time?

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I guess what I am trying to say is this. You don’t have to settle in life. You don’t have to run from a challenge. Life has to be a little nuts sometimes. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together. You absolutely should pursue your dreams, reach for the stars, and all that.

But I think it is also OK to give yourself permission to revel in the little moments. It’s fine to love something and not monetize it. To be good at something and not perform it. To appreciate the small things that bring you joy without needing to justify them to anyone.

It’s important to recognize all the little to medium to large things that have significance for you, even if they are only for you. It’s OK to be selfish with the moments that fill you up. Not everything needs to scale. Not every gift needs a stage.

Martin Tanner had it right the first time. He just didn’t know it. And nobody around him thought to say, “Hey man, you’re already singing. That’s the whole point.”

So here’s what I’d ask of you this week. Find the thing you do that makes you feel like yourself. The thing that doesn’t need an audience or a review or anyone’s permission. And just... keep doing it. Protect it. Not everything that matters has to matter to someone else.

So sing while you press the clothes. Or whatever your version of pressing clothes looks like.

Ever Forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

OK so this might seem kinda random, but I know that all this talk about AI these days can be overwhelming. So, I’m running another 90-minute online workshop on April 8th called Making Sense of AI. Some live demos, real answers about costs, limits, and privacy, a small group to learn and help feel like you might know what people are talking about.

$50. Wednesday, April 8th at 10am Pacific.

Register Here

(That link goes to my consulting website. Don’t worry, that’s me.)

Oh and yeah, I write this new newsletter every dang day. Check it out:

The AI Morning Minute

One AI term or concept, explained every morning in about a minute.

By Derek Pharr

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Dear Reader: Most weeks when I write this newsletter, I try to make it a healthy mix of writing for my own sake and giving you something worth your time. This week, I wrote this because I needed to write it for me. It's a bit self-indulgent at times, so if you wanna skip this one, no worries. Just wanted to give you a heads up.

A few months ago I was talking with a friend of mine and I said something about her being one of my people.

She paused.

“Your people? I’m one of your people?”

I thought for a moment and said yeah, of course. To me it was obvious, but perhaps it wasn’t to her.

In the months since, I’ve thought a lot about that interaction. What does it mean to be one of my people? To be a friend?

You make friends from time to time and it can be almost effortless. This passing thing of yeah, they’re my friend. But what I’ve come to realize is that I actually have some rules around friendship. I didn’t know I had them until they were broken. I know that sounds pompous. Maybe even a little wrong. But turns out I have rules. I was just as surprised as anyone.

Wanna know what they are? Here goes.

1. Don’t be a narcissist. That’s a no-brainer for me, but kinda tough for some people. Most narcissists lack the awareness to know they are one. And to be fair, for some people it’s a legitimate mental health condition. It’s not something they can control. But I still can’t be close to it.

2. I have to trust you. It doesn’t mean we braid each other’s hair and share all our deep dark secrets. But a fundamental honesty has to exist between us. If I can’t trust you, we can’t be friends.

3. You have to show up. And this y’all is where the rubber meets the road. You have to be there. Not all the time. Not for every big moment. But when things go south, or something bad happens, or some awfulness of the world threatens, you have to show the F up. In some way. In some meaningful, hey-I-tried, you-can-count-on-me, I-am-here-when-you-need-me kind of way.

So this week, let’s talk about what it means to show up, why it’s the rule that matters most, and how getting it right might be the difference between someone you once knew and someone who is one of your people.

The Rule I Didn’t Know I Had

As I’ve written about a fair amount, I lost my job six months ago. I mean, I didn’t lose it. I know where it is. It’s just that like three different people have it now. Which in its own way is kind of flattering, I guess.

Anyhoo.

In the hours and days after it happened, this galvanizing thing took place.
Some people showed up. Some people didn’t.

One of my best friends at the company kept me at arm’s length. He’d reply if I reached out, but he never really initiated unless it served him. This was a guy who made it seem like he’d do anything for me. But in the end, it was performative.

A person I’d mentored for years just…disappeared. She claimed to feel bad. I heard she was wracked with guilt. For a while, I tried to understand. But guilt that never turns into action isn’t really guilt, is it? It’s something else. Something a bit more selfish.

But what matters so much more are the people who did show up. My neighbor brought food. Some people texted every day. Some people quietly signed up for this newsletter. Every bit of it was seen. Every bit of it mattered.

When you’re at rock bottom and someone shows up for you, it changes the friendship. It stops being casual. It becomes something you’d fight for. The people who said “I’ve got you, tell me what you need” aren’t just my friends anymore. They’re something more.

And the ones who didn’t? They’re just people I once knew.

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Why We Disappear

There are a few things that happen when people don’t show up for someone.

Some people say, “I wanted to give you space.” It sounds like some totally self-aware thing, but I’m not so sure. I think that most people going through something hard don’t want space. They want to know someone is there. It’s easier to step back than to step in. Calling it “giving space” just makes abandonment sound noble. Maybe that’s just me.

Some people say, “I didn’t know what to say.” And that one’s trickier because it’s probably true. Nobody teaches you what to do when something awful happens, or someone loses someone, or gets a diagnosis that changes everything. You stare at your phone and type something and delete it and type something else and then put the phone down and tell yourself you’ll do it tomorrow. And tomorrow becomes next week. And next week becomes never.

And then there are the people who just don’t say anything. They’re never heard from again. And who knows why. They got busy. They figured you’d be fine. They didn’t think hearing from them right now would be a big deal. There’s no dramatic excuse. They just didn’t think about it.

And yeah, I get it. Life happens in real time and we all get sucked up into our own things. It’s easy to tell yourself that the other person is probably surrounded by people who care. That they don’t need one more text.

A lot of people legitimately have no idea what to do when a friend is in need. And that doesn’t make them bad people. It doesn’t make them bad friends. It’s part of being human.

But the thing that tips someone from being just a name in your contacts into a real friend is that they try anyway. They don’t know what to do or say or how to act, but they still reach out. Even if it’s super awkward. Even if the text is clumsy. Even if all they can manage is “hey, I’m thinking about you and I don’t know what to say but I’m here.”

That’s it. That’s the whole shebang. It doesn’t have to be grand gestures or road trips. You just have to try.

How to Show Up

So if you’ve read this far and you’re thinking about someone you maybe should have reached out to, or you want to be better at this going forward, here’s the playbook. None of this is complicated. All of it matters.

• Send the text. You don’t need the perfect words. “Hey, thinking about you” is enough. “I don’t know what to say but I’m here” is enough. Silence is the only wrong answer.

• Don’t wait to be asked. People in crisis rarely ask for help. They don’t want to be a burden. Show up without an invitation.

• Be specific. “Let me know if you need anything” sounds nice but puts the work on the person who’s struggling. Try “I’m dropping off dinner Tuesday” or “I’m free Thursday if you want to talk.” Give them something to say yes to, not something to figure out.

• Keep showing up. The first week after something bad happens, people get a flood of support. By week three, it’s crickets. Be the person who’s still texting in week three. And month two. And beyond.

• Don’t make it about you. This isn’t the time to share your similar experience or tell them how hard it is for you to see them going through this. Just listen. Just be there.

• Match their energy. Some people want to talk about it. Some people want to be distracted from it. Pay attention to which one your friend needs and follow their lead.

Will it be awkward sometimes? You betcha! Will you say the wrong thing? Perhaps. But the friend who stumbles through a clumsy text beats the friend who stays silent every single time and twice on Sunday.

In Conclusion

I know some people reading this will say I’m one self-righteous SOB. And you’re not wrong. I need to be more forgiving. Let it go already. Just meet people where they are. All true.

But.

I am always the guy who shows up. And maybe I hold that against people a little. Maybe I hold them to unreasonable standards. Maybe I expect too much.

But then I consider the calls I got within hours of losing my job.
Or one of my best friends calling me after my mom died.
Or the soup our neighbor sent after my wife’s surgery.
Or the couple down the block who brings us specialty popcorn every New Year.
Or the ride home from the airport after my wife and I had a pretty serious accident in Colorado.
Or the CDs our friends from college send us every Christmas.
Or the friend who was the first to sign up for one of my online workshops.
Or the beers I got with my buddy the other night for no reason at all.
Or the texts I get on my birthday from people who just wanna make sure my day has been great.
Or the job postings some folks keep sending me.
Or the random notes I get from people who read this newsletter.

That’s what showing up looks like. It’s not one big thing. It’s a hundred small ones.

And every single one of those people? Yeah, those are my people.

Ever Forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

HOLD UP! I’m running a 90-minute online workshop on April 8th called Making Sense of AI. Plain language, live demos, real answers about costs, limits, and privacy. Same stuff I teach every week at North Seattle College.

$50. Wednesday, April 8th at 10am Pacific.

Register Here

(That link goes to my consulting website. Don’t worry, that’s me.)

Also, I write this new newsletter every dang day. Check it out:

The AI Morning Minute

One AI term or concept, explained every morning in about a minute.

By Derek Pharr

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My sister had her son a bit later in life. By the time he arrived, my own kids were well into their teens. So when she was with us a few months in, running on no sleep, wrestling with a fussy baby, and navigating a separation from her husband, her world seemed upside down. After a particularly rough stretch, she sat with me and Michelle and said, almost pleading, “It gets easier, right?”

Michelle and I just looked at each other. I think we mumbled something about how tough it is when you’re not sleeping. Which is parent code for: we didn’t have the heart to tell you the truth.

The truth is, kids are unrelenting. At every age.

Ours are in their twenties now, and by every reasonable metric, they’re killing it. Professionally, academically, socially, cute-as-can-be-ally. And as tempting as it would be to take a victory lap, parenting still kicks our ass on the regular. Bigger kids, bigger problems. We’ve traded diapers and sleepless nights for relationship advice, career guidance, and... well, sleepless nights.

They say you can only be as happy as your saddest child. And by and large, we’re happy. We have every right to be. But this little journey we’re on? It never gets easy. At any age. It just changes shape.

So the real answer to my sister’s question isn’t “yes.” It’s that you learn to handle hard better. And that’s not just a parenting thing. That’s a life thing.

So this week, let’s talk about handling hard better, what it really means, why it matters, and how you can build the kind of resilience that doesn’t crumble when the stakes go up.

The Myth of Easier

We all have a version of my sister’s question. It just sounds different depending on where you are in life. Getting through this week. Closing on the house. The kids starting school. There’s always a finish line out there where everything supposedly calms down.

It’s a sweet little thought. It’s also a blatant lie.

I spent so long wanting to believe in the myth of the easier life. When my kids were babies, I was sure toddlerhood would be the relief. When they were toddlers, school age was going to be the break. Teens? They can drive. They can make a sandwich. Surely this is where it levels out. Nope. The hard didn’t leave. It just changed shape. Diapers became co-signing on apartments. Tantrums became tuition conversations.

I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but a while back the head coach of Duke women’s basketball gave a talk about handling adversity. Her name is Kara Lawson, and the video went viral for her blunt message and oh so relatable honesty. Life never gets easier, she says. You just become someone who handles hard stuff better. Stop waiting for the easy. It’s not coming.

Which is both deeply inspiring and deeply depressing.

But she’s right. And it connects to something I wrote about a while back about taking the path of most resistance. The hard stuff isn’t a detour. It is the road. You don’t get to skip it. You don’t get to outrun it. You just learn to walk it with better shoes.

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What Changes When You Stop Waiting for Easy

So if easy isn’t coming, what does handling hard better actually look like in practice? It’s a fair question. And the answer is annoyingly unsexy.

It looks like steadiness. Not some zen master calm where nothing bothers you. Just the quiet confidence that comes from knowing you’ve done hard before and come out the other side.

Let me give you an example. We just found out one of our cats has feline diabetes. And I know, it’s a cat. We are operating on a sliding scale of life events here. But still, she needs a two-day overnight hospitalization and after that we’re going to have to give her twice-a-day shots for likely the rest of her life.

We already lead pretty busy lives. And between the cost, the energy, and the what-the-hell of it all, it’s hard. But we’ve been through worse. We’ve weathered tougher storms. This isn’t even the hardest pet calamity we’ve endured. So we’ll roll up our sleeves and figure it all out. Not because I’m some enlightened guru who has cracked the code on suffering. I mean, I still can’t figure out how to fold a fitted sheet. I just have more reps.

And reps matter more than people give them credit for. Your first crisis feels like the world is ending. Your tenth still hurts, but your feet are under you. You know that the 3am brain is a liar. You know that most of the scenarios it’s spinning up won’t happen. You know that sleep will do more for the problem than your phone will.

My sister didn’t have those reps yet. That’s why she was asking the question. She wasn’t weak. She was new at this. And there’s a big difference between the two.

Getting Your Reps

So how do you actually get reps at handling hard? Because you can’t just sit around waiting for life to punch you in the neck and hope you learn something from it. That’s not a strategy. That’s just getting punched in the neck.

The key is to start where the consequences are small.

It’s honestly why I love sports so much for young people. Not for the trophies or the college applications or whatever else we’ve decided youth athletics is supposed to be about. I love it because it’s this incredible lab for adversity. You lose a game. It hurts. And then there’s another game on Thursday. You miss the shot. Everybody saw. And the world keeps spinning. You ride the bench for a month, and you have to figure out whether you’re going to sulk or work.

None of that will ruin your life. But all of it builds something. You’re learning how to sit in discomfort without falling apart. How to bounce back from a bad day without making it your whole identity. How to keep showing up when showing up kind of sucks. Those are reps. Real ones.

And the principle works well past your playing days. You can do a version of this as an adult:

• Ask for the raise knowing they might say no.

• Volunteer to present to the room when your stomach says absolutely not.

• Say no to the thing you don’t have time for instead of saying “maybe” and hoping it goes away.

• Start a project knowing it could flop.

I wrote a while back about rejection challenges and the people who practice getting told no on purpose. Same idea. Put yourself in the path of manageable difficulty, and the unmanageable stuff gets a little less terrifying.

The key word there is manageable. You don’t train for a marathon by running one. You start with a mile that makes your lungs burn and your knees question your life choices. Then you do it again. And again. And one day you look up and realize the thing that used to wreck you barely registers.

That’s what reps do. Not make hard easy. Just make hard familiar.

In Conclusion

My sister’s son is six now. He’s loud and funny and exhausting and wonderful. And if I had to guess, I’d wager she’d say her life now is not easier than it was. It is just different hard.

I still think about that night she asked us the question. And I wish I’d had a better answer for her than a tired look and a mumble about sleep deprivation. So if I could go back, here’s what I’d say.

No. It doesn't get easier. Not really. Get used to disappointment. But you will get steadier. The hard will keep coming, and it’ll keep changing shape, and some days it’ll still knock the ever living crap out of you. But you’ll get back up faster. You’ll panic less. You’ll trust yourself more. And one day you’ll be sitting across from someone who’s right where you used to be, and they’ll ask you the same question. And you might know exactly what to say.

This week, try one small rep. Just one. Something that makes you a little uncomfortable but won’t break you. Ask, speak up, say no, start. See what it feels like to choose the hard on purpose.

Ever Forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

HEY hold up! I’ve got a new daily newsletter that breaks down AI, one term at a time. Think of it like a word of the day for AI terminology. 60 seconds a day to help you sound like you know what you’re talking about.

Give it a look ⤵︎⤵︎⤵︎

The AI Morning Minute

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By Derek Pharr

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I see the flinch in people’s faces when it comes up. They look away or suddenly find something very interesting at the bottom of their coffee mug. It is that “oh... sorry to hear that” face. The same look people give you when you tell them your childhood dog died or that you have decided to give it all up and go to clown college. It is awkward. I get it. I am sorry.

But what I probably do not talk about enough is what happened next. The months since have been the most productive stretch of my career. I am building things I never would have attempted. Testing ideas I used to ignore. Learning at a speed that was impossible when I was spending my energy navigating someone else’s bad priorities.

My old business partner used to tell me he wanted to “unlock” me. He said it with a tone like I was a puzzle he had not figured out yet. He treated me like a Rubik’s Cube he would eventually just give up on and throw in a junk drawer. It turns out he was right about one thing. I was locked. Just not in the way he meant.

There is a concept in complexity science called the adjacent possible. A scientist named Stuart Kauffman used it to describe how things evolve in biology and technology. The idea is that change does not happen in giant leaps. It happens one step at a time. And each step reveals new options that were invisible before.

Think of it like a floor plan. At any given moment, you can only reach the doors next to the room you are already in. You cannot skip ahead. You cannot see three rooms away. But every time you walk through a new door, a whole new set of doors appears.

Getting fired did not just push me out of a room. It put me in a completely different building.

So this week, let’s talk about the adjacent possible, why getting knocked off your path might be the only way to find a better one, and how to start opening doors you didn’t know were there.

The Room You’re Already In

I liked my old job. I need to say that out loud because people assume if you got fired, things must have been terrible. They were not. Not always.

I had stability. Autonomy. Decent money. Real impact. I liked the safety of it all. From the outside, and honestly from the inside, it looked like a room worth staying in.

But somewhere along the way, the learning curve flattened out. I stopped growing. The work that used to challenge me became routine. And the people around me were not helping. Some were narcissistic and ego-driven. The kind of leaders who confuse control with competence. The professional equivalent of a toddler holding a plastic steering wheel in the backseat, fully convinced they are driving the car.

And as I got deeper into the company, I understood every system, every relationship, every unspoken rule. That knowledge made me valuable. It also made me feel like I could never leave.

That is what golden handcuffs actually look like. It is not just the money. It is the identity. The comfort. The story you tell yourself about who you are inside those walls. The longer you stay, the harder it gets to picture yourself anywhere else. You start thinking this room is the only room. That the walls around you are the boundaries of what is possible.

And that is the most dangerous part. Not the bad leadership. Not the stagnation. The quiet belief that you have already found the only room worth being in.

I was getting more unhappy and felt taken advantage of, and yet I stayed. Not because the room was great. Because I had forgotten there were other rooms out there.

When you stop moving through doors, you stop seeing them. The room does not lock from the outside. It locks from the inside.

The Push

Getting fired was NOT part of my plan. There was no graceful exit. No “mutual decision.” It felt disorienting. It felt gross.

You read about betrayal in books or see it in movies. But when it actually happens to you, it is not dramatic music and slow-motion rain. It is sitting in your car in a parking lot trying to figure out what just happened. It is staring at your phone wondering who to call first. It just makes you lose your sense of direction.

And I want to be honest about that part. I do not want to skip ahead to the inspirational reframe, the training montage, and pretend the middle did not happen. The middle was bad y’all. The middle involved a lot of staring at ceilings and questioning every professional relationship I had ever built.

But as terrible as that was, it was necessary. I never would have left on my own. The room was too comfortable. Too familiar. Inertia is the most powerful force in a career. It makes decisions for you so you do not have to make them yourself. You just keep showing up, keep cashing the check, keep telling yourself that next quarter will be different.

I did not walk through a door. I got shoved through one.

And that shove (as unwelcome as it was) changed what I could see. I had space to listen and observe. I had space to study things that felt scary just weeks earlier. Tools I “did not have time” to learn became the most important part of my day. Ideas I had parked in the back of my brain started demanding attention.

Just like that, I was in a different room. And when that happens, you look up and new doors appear.

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Opening the Doors

Inflection points do not announce themselves. They do not send a calendar invite or post on LinkedIn. Most of the time, they just feel like upheaval.

The pattern only shows up in the rearview mirror. When I was in the thick of it, I was not thinking about rooms or doors. I was thinking about my mortgage and the fact that my business partners had just casually discarded me.

But I have had this weird, almost accidental timing with technology my whole career. I moved to Seattle in 1995. Which, as history has shown, was a pretty great time to show up in a city about to change the world. I got a job at Adobe in the late ‘90s. Helped build a startup a decade later. And now here I am, standing right in the middle of the biggest technology shift most of us will see in our lifetimes. Every single one of those moments felt like just another Tuesday when it happened. The pattern only became visible later.

That is the funny thing about doors. You do not get access to the next room by waiting around. You get it by moving, even when you do not know where you are going. You stumble. You fail. You figure a few things out. And you eventually realize that “unlocking” yourself is not a one-time event. It is a daily practice.

So if you are standing in a room that does not fit anymore, here are three ways to start moving.

• Stop asking for permission. You do not need anyone to “unlock” your potential. That is a lie told by people who want to keep you where you are. Build a small, messy version of your idea today and put it in front of someone who will give you honest, brutal feedback.

• Start a friction log. Patterns only show up later, so start writing them down now. Every day, jot down one thing that felt off, frustrating, or disorienting. In three weeks, that log will show you which doors are actually worth opening.

• Talk to someone outside your industry. Reach out to one person who has nothing to do with your current world. Ask them how they solve a specific problem you are facing. You are looking for a different perspective. One that breaks your golden handcuff thinking.

In Conclusion

Disruption feels an awful lot like destruction while you are in it. It forces motion. And motion is what opens the next door. That process is almost always uncomfortable.

I am not saying getting fired was a gift. But my old business partner was right about one thing. I was locked. I was spending my energy on someone else’s bad priorities instead of building my own.

Now I am gleefully unlocked. Running wild with ideas, energy, and execution. Building things I never would have attempted inside those old walls.

And if you see me at a party and the topic comes up, you do not have to make that face anymore. I am not the guy who got fired. I am the guy who got pushed into a different building and found better doors.

People still flinch (two for flinching!) when I bring it up. Fair enough. But I stopped flinching a while ago.

If you are waiting for someone to “unlock” your potential, stop. Who needs a key when you can kick down the damn door.

Ever forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

Hey guys, lately I’ve taken this postscript to promote something for yours truly, but this time I am asking for a favor. A dear friend of mine is going through it right now and if you have even just a few dollars to spare, I know it would mean the world to their family. So please take a minute and do what you can with this GoFundMe.

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Not a “let’s go see temples and eat Indonesian fried rice” kind of trip. This was a structured retreat with a group of women she’d never met. Days of meditation, journaling, and the kind of intensive self-reflection that only happens when you’re 8,000 miles from your kitchen and your to-do list. A journey to stillness, they called it.

She came back a little different. More like someone had adjusted her contrast settings. Colors were a little more vivid. Boundaries were a little more firm. And she kept talking about this triangle.

The Triangle of Personal Power. Three corners, three states. At any given moment, you’re doing one of three things with your power: giving it away, taking it back, or standing in it.

She told me about it over dinner. I could see it landed for her. Like a tuning fork had been struck somewhere deep and was still humming. She’d made a necklace while she was there. Not bought. Made. Sat down with a silversmith, pounded the metal, picked out the gem. The whole nine. It was her reminder, her totem. She’d reference the triangle in conversations. It clearly MEANT something to her.

And being the supportive husband that I am, I listened. I nodded. I asked questions. I said all the right things.

But truthfully I didn’t really get it.

I wanted to. I so wanted to. She’d bring up the triangle and I’d do my best impression of a person having a breakthrough. Yeah, honey. That’s great. I love that for you. But it felt like being handed a tool I couldn’t figure out how to use. Like someone giving you a torque wrench when you don’t even know what a torque wrench is for (no one does BTW).

And the thing is, I should have gotten it. I’ve written about power. I quote books on power. Understanding power dynamics is kind of my whole jam. But this framework? It just bounced right off me.

Then everything fell apart. My life got turned upside down. And as I grieved, and struggled, and raged (oh, how I raged), my wife would occasionally check in. Not nagging, not lecturing. Just a quiet question: Where are you in your power right now?

And slowly, the triangle started to make sense. Not because someone explained it better. Because I was finally living inside of it.

There’s a saying that gets attributed to Buddha, Lao Tzu, and perhaps Zorro: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” The best lessons don’t come from a single source. They show up when you’ve been softened up (read: pummeled) enough to receive them.

So this week, let’s talk about personal power, what it really means, why we give it away so easily, and how you can start standing in yours.

Why We Give It Away

You almost never hand over your power all at once. There’s no dramatic moment where you hand someone your keys and say “you drive.” It’s more like this slow leak. A thousand tiny surrenders that barely register on their own.

You say yes when you really wanted to say no way. Someone else’s bad mood rewires your entire afternoon. You apologize for something that didn’t require an apology. Small stuff. Barely worth mentioning.

But then there are the sneaky ones.

Scrolling your phone and letting an algorithm decide how you feel for the next two hours. Not asking for what you want when you already know exactly what you want. Sitting in a room full of people and not sharing your idea because you’ve already decided you’re the least qualified person there. Giving a painful memory the microphone and then wondering why you feel so small.

None of these feel like giving your power away. They feel normal. They feel polite. Some of them even feel responsible. And that’s exactly why they work so well.

By the end of the week, you’re running on empty and you can’t even point to where it all went.

What Taking It Back Actually Looks Like

Taking your power back is not a montage. There’s no training sequence or inspirational soundtrack, no moment where you stand on a mountain and declare yourself healed. A lot of the time it’s quieter than that. And it takes longer than you want it to.

For years, I worked with people who didn’t see me. I don’t mean I was invisible. I’m loud. I’m always there. I’m pretty hard to miss. But my input, my ideas, my vision, my direction? Those were easy to overlook. I didn’t go to the fanciest college (go Northern Colorado Bears!). My degree is in communications. I came to technology through food service. I don’t have an MBA. My skills were “soft,” which made them easy to discount.

And for a long time, that really bothered me. My confidence was tied to recognition I wasn’t going to get. I kept waiting for someone to look at my work and say, yes, this guy gets it. I was handing my self-worth to people who didn’t even know what they were holding.

But over time, something started to shift. I began to realize that the people holding me to some invisible, ever-changing standard didn’t actually know me at all. Their measurements had nothing to do with my value and everything to do with their own insecurities. And I had years of adding value with the receipts to prove it.

That awareness didn’t arrive all at once. It crept in. But once it did, I stopped hoping for approval that was never going to come. I realized I could trust evidence over the opinions.

That’s one way to take your power back. It’s not a declaration. You don't need a patch on your arm or anything. It’s a decision you make so quietly that nobody notices but you. You stop auditioning for people who were never going to clap.

But awareness is just one part of the process. And it’s the relatively easy part. The hard part is what comes next.

• You set a boundary and watch someone get annoyed by it.

• You say “no, that doesn’t work for me” and everybody gets kinda quiet.

• You stop apologizing mid-sentence and the people around you don’t quite know what to do with this new version of you.

There’s this awkward retraining period for everyone in your life, including yourself. Especially yourself. Because when you’ve been the person who always says yes, always smooths things over, always makes it easy for everyone else, choosing yourself feels like breaking a contract nobody remembers signing.

The hardest part of taking your power back isn’t knowing you should. It’s that it feels wrong when you do. You’ve been giving it away for so long that keeping it feels selfish. It’s not. It just feels that way until it doesn’t.

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Standing In Your Power (And Staying There)

So yeah, standing in your power, it’s not really a destination. There’s no finish line. It’s more like balance. You find it, you lose it, you find it again. The skill isn’t staying perfectly centered. The skill is noticing when you’ve drifted.

Standing in your power doesn’t mean living without fear and it certainly doesn’t mean you have all the answers. But it does mean you know who you are and you stop asking other people to confirm it.

It’s the difference between walking into a room and thinking I hope they like me versus I know why I am here and what I bring to the table. Between reacting to everything that comes at you and choosing what actually deserves your energy.

And the people who do it well? They don’t look the way you’d expect. They’re not the loudest. They’re not the most aggressive. They’re typically the calmest person in the room. The one who can disagree without making it a battle. The one who can sit with silence and not rush to fill it.

My wife still asks me that question from time to time (okay often). Where are you in your power right now? It’s a deceptively simple check-in. And I’ve started asking it of myself. Usually the need to ask is actually the answer. If I’m spinning about something someone said, I’m likely giving it away.

But if I can just be still without performing or defending or apologizing…

That's me standing in it. So steal my wife's question. When something rattles you, when you feel yourself getting smaller or louder than you actually are, pause and ask: where am I in my power right now?

In Conclusion

Power is a funny thing. It’s this quiet currency that you spend without realizing it. If you can wield it, you can do amazing things. But when you lose it, you just feel smaller. And you can’t always explain why.

And it’s honestly not something I think a lot of us think about. When we think of power we think of an electrical grid or some political drama on TV. Or maybe oppression, or politics. It can be an uncomfortable concept to sit with.

But my wife came back from Bali and started to normalize the consideration of it. To understand that you exist in varying states of power almost all the time. And that taking power and holding it for yourself is not selfish. It’s healthy.

The part I originally missed was that this isn’t a framework you study. It’s one you feel. You can read every book on power ever written (and I’ve read a few) and still miss it completely. Because knowing about power and knowing where yours is are two very different things.

So if this whole triangle thing sounds a little too retreat-in-Bali for you, I get it. I was you. But try the question anyway. Just once this week, when you feel off, when something is gnawing at you and you can’t name it, ask yourself: where am I in my power right now?

You might not like the answer. But I am willing to bet you’ll know exactly what to do with it.

Ever forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

Oh hey, kinda random but I've got a new daily newsletter that breaks down AI, one term at a time. Think of it like a word of the day for AI terminology. 60 seconds a day to help you sound like you know what you're talking about.

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The AI Morning Minute

One AI term or concept, explained every morning in about a minute.

By Derek Pharr

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I’m running a 90-minute online workshop this Wednesday called Making Sense of AI. I mentioned it a few weeks back. It’s for people who keep hearing about AI, suspect they should probably understand it better, but haven’t found a starting point that doesn’t feel like drinking from a fire hose.

I teach this stuff every week at North Seattle College. Wednesday’s session is the same straightforward approach: plain language, live demos, real answers about costs, limits, and privacy.

$50. Wednesday, February 25th. 10am Pacific.

REGISTER HERE

FYI: That link takes you to my consulting website, don’t worry that’s me!

OK that’s it, back to your weekend.

Ever forward,
— Derek

Not at Walgreens. They’re just doing their job. And not at my wife’s doctor, who prescribed meds she actually needs. I was mad at...oh ya know...the world! Since losing my job, we've had to sort out our own health insurance through the exchange, which, fun fact, right about 23 million Americans are doing right now. We picked a plan, got everything set up, and for a minute there it felt like we’d crossed a finish line. Health insurance. Meds. Vision. Dental. All covered. Deep breath. Phew, okay. We’re good.

Then the pharmacy total hit $175 and we were both standing there like, what about our copay?

Turns out our new plan has tiered medication pricing. These meds fell into tiers two and three, which means insurance barely helps. And to add insult to injury, it doesn’t even count toward our deductible. It felt a little like lighting money on fire. But we needed the meds so we paid.

I was mad for about an hour. Not all-day mad. More like “I have a splinter I can’t get out” mad. Because I thought I had this figured out. And I didn’t. And this was just one more kick in the crotch from a job loss that happened months ago but keeps finding new ways to remind me it’s not done with me yet.

But then I sat down to write. And as I started processing, I realized that $175 wasn’t just a pharmacy bill. It was tuition. The cost of learning something I didn’t know I needed to learn.

So this week, let’s talk about unexpected tuition, the lessons that show up disguised as bills, setbacks, and bad days, and how to actually learn from them.

The Long Tail of a Bad Day

When something big goes wrong in your life, there’s a moment where most everyone rallies (hopefully). You lose a job, and people check in. You go through a breakup, and friends show up with pizza and opinions. There’s an initial blast of chaos, and then you handle it. You make the calls. You update the resume. You pick the insurance plan. And at some point, you exhale and think, okay, the worst part is over.

It’s not.

Big disruptions don’t stop when the crisis ends no matter how much you want them to. They just sorta stop being so loud. But what follows is quieter and more insidious. A pharmacy bill you didn’t budget for. A networking event that makes you feel like you’re begging. A random Tuesday where you realize you haven’t updated your LinkedIn and now you’re staring at your profile photo from three years ago wondering if that person even exists anymore.

These aren’t the main event. They’re aftershocks. And they hit you harder than you’d think they would mainly because you stopped budgeting emotional resilience for them.

Psychologists call this cumulative adversity, the idea that stressful events don’t happen in isolation. They compound. One stressful event doesn’t just create one problem. It sets off a chain of smaller ones. Financial stress chips away at your confidence. Uncertainty about work messes with your sleep. Bad sleep makes you more impatient. And then one day you’re standing in a Walgreens losing your mind over a freaking copay, and you can’t figure out why it feels so damn personal.

Well, it feels personal because it is.

Every little aftershock is a reminder that the thing you thought you’d handled is still handling you.

And the really awful part is that nobody warns you about this phase of the game. The initial crisis gets a playbook. Lose your job? Here are five steps. Going through a divorce? Here’s a checklist. But nobody hands you a guide for month four, when the adrenaline is gone and the surprise expenses start rolling in like a subscription you forgot to cancel.

So if you’re in that stretch right now, the part where the big thing happened a while ago but little things keep catching you off guard, you’re not falling behind. You’re in the long tail. And it’s completely normal to be kinda pissed off.

The question is what you do with that annoyance.

Hey guys, tired of nodding along when people talk about AI? I’m running a "Making Sense of AI" workshop on Feb 25th.
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The “I Had This Figured Out” Trap

There’s a special kind of frustration that comes from being surprised by something you thought you already had figured out. It’s not just the money or the inconvenience. It’s something else.

You did the work. You made the calls. You compared the plans. You picked one. And for a brief, beautiful, shining moment, you got to check that box and move on with your life. You were an administrative god.

Except you weren’t. Not really. And that’s kinda what stung the most standing in that Walgreens. Not the $175. The fact that I’d done everything right and it didn’t seem to matter.

Your brain does this thing where finishing a task feels the same as solving a problem. Psychologists call this the completion bias. Your brain looooovvves checking boxes. It gives you a little hit of dopamine every time you do. And once that box is checked, your brain files the whole thing under “done” and moves on and might even get a little sassy about it.

But complicated problems don’t stay solved for long. They evolve. The plan you made with the information you had was the best plan available at the time. And that doesn’t make it wrong; it just makes it incomplete. And there’s a big difference there, even if they feel identical when you’re standing at a pharmacy counter doing math in your head.

I think this is where a lot of people get stuck after a major life change. Not in the crisis itself, but in the gap between “I handled it” and “oh crap, there’s more.” That gap is disorienting. It makes you question your own competence. You start thinking, how did I miss this? And then that spirals into, oh no, what else am I missing?

The answer, by the way, is all sorts of things. And that’s okay.

The fix isn’t to become some hyper-vigilant worst-case-scenario planner who stress-reads insurance documents at midnight. The fix is to change what “handled” means in your head. Stop treating it like a finish line. Start treating it like a first pass. You did the best you could with what you knew. Now you know more. So you adjust.

That’s not falling down. That’s just how complicated life things work.

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Tuition, Not Punishment

That afternoon at the pharmacy, I had a choice. I could keep being mad about the $175. Or I could decide it taught me something.

I went with option two. And the moment I did, the whole thing shifted. Not the facts. The facts were the same. The meds still cost too much (insert rant about healthcare in America here). The insurance plan still had gaps I didn’t know about. But the story I was telling myself changed. It went from “I got screwed” to “now I know.” And those are two very different places to operate from.

That’s the difference between tuition and punishment. Punishment says, “I should have known better.” Tuition says, “Hey you just learned something!” Same event. Completely different vibe. One keeps you stuck replaying the mistake. The other gives you something to carry forward.

And this doesn’t just apply to pharmacy bills. Every unexpected hit after a major life change is trying to teach you something, if you’re willing to sit with it long enough to figure out what that something might be.

So here’s how to start treating your setbacks like tuition instead of punishment.

• Ask the one question that matters. After something catches you off guard, stop and ask yourself, “What did this just teach me?” Not “why does this keep happening” or “what’s wrong with me.” This one act can turn a frustrating moment into usable knowledge.

• Separate the surprise from the problem. Half the frustration of an aftershock is the shock itself. You’re not just dealing with the issue, you’re dealing with the fact that you didn’t see it coming. Those are two different things. Name them separately. The surprise is just your expectations catching up to reality. The actual problem is usually smaller than it feels in the moment.

• Stop expecting a clean ending. Big life changes don’t send a final bill. They send installments. The sooner you accept that, the less each surprise will knock you sideways. You’re not doing it wrong. You’re just still in it. And “still in it” is a completely valid place to be. (More on handling hard things better in a future issue. Stay tuned.)

In Conclusion

That night, I did what any self-respecting angry person with Wi-Fi would do. I went down a rabbit hole (pun intended). I spent about an hour researching prescription drug pricing and found out there’s a whole world of options I never knew existed. Washington state has a free discount card called ArrayRx. Mark Cuban has a whole pharmacy company built around transparent pricing. GoodRx is out there doing its thing.

I ended up going with Amazon Pharmacy. And yeah, I don’t love giving more money to Amazon. But I got a 60-day supply of my trazodone (I have insomnia, by the way) for under $3.

Three dollars. That’s better pricing than I had when I was employed with fancy corporate insurance.

Turns out the simplest answer was extraordinarily hard to find. Not because it was hidden. Because I had no reason to go looking until a Walgreens receipt made me mad enough to try.

So again, that pharmacy trip was my tuition. But the cool thing about tuition is that it is an investment that pays for itself if you do something with what you learned. I was shaking angry at a pharmacy counter on a Tuesday afternoon. But by that evening, I’d found a better solution than the one I’d had for years.

Sometimes the best thing that can happen to you is getting a bill that feels like a slap in the face. Not because anything about all this is fair. But because the anger lights a fire in you. And every once in a while, the thing you manage to find is better than what you had before everything fell apart.

As always, thanks for reading,

Ever forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

Oh hey, speaking of learning things. I've got a new daily newsletter that breaks down AI, one term at a time. Think of it like a word of the day for AI terminology. 60 seconds a day to help you sound like you know what you're talking about.

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The AI Morning Minute

One AI term or concept, explained every morning in about a minute.

By Derek Pharr

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You have to understand something about my father. This was a man who defused bombs in World War II. He parented largely through passive aggression and well-timed looks. He almost never told me anything about how to live my life.

So when he looked me dead in the eye and said, “Son, you can be anything you want to be in this life. You have the skill, passion, and drive to do anything you want,” I leaned in.

Then he paused.

“Don’t be a teacher.”

My dad was a teacher. My mom was a teacher. My brother was a teacher. And in time, my sister became one too. I grew up in a house so full of educators that our dinner table basically had office hours.

And here was the patriarch of that household, a man who survived disarming live ordnance, telling me with all the earnestness he could muster not to follow in his footsteps.

So yeah. I went a different way.

I went into restaurants. Which (oddly) led to Kinko’s. Which led to desktop publishing. Which led to Adobe. Then a startup. And an entire life in tech.

And now? Well, I’m teaching at North Seattle College. Running online workshops. Working with companies on AI readiness. And writing this newsletter about simplifying the stuff that feels overwhelming, which, if we’re being honest, is just teaching with better fonts.

I don’t know if Dad would be proud or mortified.

So this week, let’s talk about the things we can’t outrun, why the long way around isn’t wasted, and how to recognize when you’ve been doing the thing all along.

You’re Soaking in It

Psychologist Albert Bandura spent decades studying how people learn. What he landed on, Social Learning Theory, boils down to something every parent already knows: your kids are always watching.

The theory says we don’t just learn from direct instruction or personal experience. We learn by observing the people around us, absorbing their behaviors, attitudes, and reactions, then reproducing them as our own. Bandura called it observational learning. And the people we observe most closely are the ones with status, authority, and proximity. Like Mom and Dad. Every single day.

Researchers studying career patterns found that children of military parents were nearly four times more likely to go into the military. Kids of farmers became farmers. And children of teachers? You can see where I’m going with this.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this as a pimply-faced 17-year-old. All I knew was that our house ran on lesson plans, red pens, and the unmistakable exhaustion of people who cared deeply about other people’s kids as well as their own. I watched my parents grade papers at the kitchen table. I saw the frustration when a student wasn’t getting it, and the quiet pride when one finally did.

I was absorbing a masterclass in teaching.

Bandura would say all four stages of observational learning were ticking away in the background. Attention. Retention. Reproduction. Motivation. Like a clock I couldn’t hear, but still recording the time.

And that’s the tricky thing about what you grow up around. You don’t have to chase it for it to get inside you. It just moves in. Sets up shop. Waits.

My parents never once told me I should teach. My dad actively told me not to. But the modeling was already done. I’d spent nearly two decades watching people translate complicated ideas into simpler ones. Watching them connect with struggling learners. Pounding knowledge into (at times) idle brains.

Especially mine.

In middle school, dad threatened to ground me for mixing up “their” and “there” in a paper. He might have been kidding. Was he kidding? I honestly don’t know and I have had that locked in ever since.

That wasn’t a career track. It was a worldview. And worldviews don’t care about career plans.

Oh hey, quick aside: If you’re getting value from this newsletter and want to support what I’m building, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. You’ll get a monthly digital goodie boxes, stickers (yes, actual stickers), and the satisfaction of knowing you helped fund my questionable police car choices.

The Forbidden Fruit Is Always Sweeter

Ever hear of Reactance Theory? No? You didn’t know you’d signed up for Psych 101 with this newsletter, did you? Oh yeah, mom also taught Psychology.

In 1966, psychologist Jack Brehm coined the term to describe something we’ve all felt. When people sense their freedom of choice is being restricted, they experience a motivational state aimed at reclaiming that freedom. Put simply: tell someone they can’t do something, and they suddenly want to do it more.

Brehm ran experiments with toddlers. He put toys behind barriers of different heights. The toys behind the tall barriers, the ones that were harder to reach, were consistently the ones the kids wanted most. The toys were identical. The only difference was that one group was told, in effect, “no, not that one.”

Now, I’m not saying my dad’s advice backfired in any obvious way. I didn’t storm off at 17 to get a teaching certificate out of spite. I genuinely went a different direction. Restaurants, copy shops, tech. Thirty years of a different direction.

But Brehm’s research points to something subtler than outright rebellion. Reactance doesn’t always show up as defiance. Sometimes it shows up as a quiet gravitational pull. A thing you can’t quite name that keeps nudging you toward the door marked “DO NOT ENTER.”

My dad told me not to teach. And for decades, I didn’t. But the whole time, I was doing something suspiciously close. Translating complicated tech jargon into language normal humans could understand. Running workshops. Writing things that helped people figure stuff out. I tell people I speak three languages: English, Engineer, and Customer.

That’s teaching. I was just calling it something else.

Which makes me wonder how many of us are doing exactly that. Running from a thing while accidentally running toward it. Changing the label on the jar without changing what’s inside.

Reactance doesn’t always look like rebellion. Sometimes it’s quieter than that. The pull doesn’t go away just because you ignore it. It just gets patient.

The Scenic Route Has Better Views

Here’s where I could tell you that I wasted three decades avoiding my true calling. It would make for a tidy narrative. The prodigal teacher, returning home after years in the wilderness.

But that’s not quite right. Teaching isn’t my whole life now. It’s a part of it. I still do consulting. I still work in tech. But I teach a class at North Seattle College on the side and run online workshops about making sense of AI (shameless plug!) The teaching piece isn’t a replacement for everything else. It’s more like the thread that finally ties everything else together.

And that thread only exists because of the detours. But those detours aren’t detours at all. They’re prerequisites.

My years in restaurants taught me how to read a room and talk to people. Kinko’s taught me patience and introduced me to technology. Adobe gave me a front-row seat to how technology reshapes entire industries. A startup taught me how to build things from scratch and figure out how to make them work for real, actual people.

Every single one of those jobs was secretly building the skill set I use now.

Which brings me to a Japanese concept called ikigai. It translates roughly to “a reason for being,” and it’s often shown as four overlapping circles: what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Where all four overlap? That’s your ikigai. Your sweet spot.

Most of us don’t land there in a straight line. We find one circle at a time. You spend years doing what you can get paid for. You stumble into what you’re good at. Somewhere along the way, you notice what you love. And if you’re lucky, you realize the world actually needs it too.

The scenic route isn’t wasted. It’s how you fill in the circles. (And ikigai is something I’ll be writing a lot more about in a future newsletter. Stay tuned.)

So if you’ve been wondering whether your own winding path is leading anywhere, here are a few questions worth sitting with:

• What keeps showing up? Look across your jobs, hobbies, and the things people ask you for help with. Is there a thread? For me it was always simplifying the complicated. Didn’t matter if it was a restaurant menu, a copy machine, or an AI platform.

• What do people say you’re good at that you never trained for? That’s probably something you absorbed, not studied. The thing that feels effortless to you but valuable to everyone else.

• What are you doing for free that other people charge for? If you keep doing the thing without getting paid, that’s not a hobby. That’s a circle waiting to overlap.

• What did you grow up watching? Go back to Bandura. The behaviors you observed as a kid didn’t disappear. They’re still running in the background. What did the adults in your life do every day that you now find yourself doing too?

You don’t have to blow up your life. You don’t need a grand pivot. But if you’ve been circling the same thing for years, calling it different names in different contexts, maybe it’s time to stop and call it what it is.

The long way around isn’t wasted after all. And might just be thing you’ve been doing all along.

In Conclusion

I never asked him why.

Why teaching was the one thing to avoid. He never said and I never asked. I can guess it had something to do with the poor pay, the lack of appreciation, the mountain of grading and prep. But those are me filling in blanks he left empty.

That conversation was a long time ago. But only if you measure in terms of years.

My dad told me not to follow in his footsteps. And I listened for a few decades. But when you tell someone not to do something that's already in their DNA, you don't kill the impulse, you kinda just buy them time. Time to go out, gather experience, and come back to it on their own terms.

So yeah, I'm teaching. And I don't think he'd be surprised.

I was always a great student, but I can be a terrible listener.

Ever forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

P.S. Dad wouldn’t like it but I'm teaching a beginner-friendly AI workshop online. No prior experience needed. Just curiosity and a willingness to try something new.

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A few years ago, I got invited to a product management dinner in Seattle. At the time, I had Chief Product Officer in my title so the invite made sense on paper. Leaders in product management getting together to discuss ideas, share best practices, network. I said yes.

I arrived for drinks and mingling before dinner. But within minutes, I wanted to leave.

I was head of product for a medium-sized company, running my small corner of the world. The people around me? Ex-Amazon. Ex-Google. Current Salesforce. Early-stage startup founders raising oh so much money. They talked about AI integration like it was a given. They referenced product trends I’d sorta, kinda heard of. My company wasn’t exploring new tech. We just did what we did, quietly, in our niche. I felt so behind.

I can small talk with the best of them, so I hung in there. But the imposter syndrome kinda smacked me in the face.

In my head I started running through things like: “Good lord, am I even qualified to be here?” Then: “Wait, what does qualified even mean?” Then: “Why do I care so much about being qualified?” Then: “If I didn’t care, would that make me seem aloof?” Round and round I went in my little brain. Just questions stacked on top of questions.

Philosophers call this infinite regress. The rest of us call it exhausting.

There’s an old joke that does a pretty good job of explaining this. What holds up the earth? A giant turtle. What holds up the turtle? Another turtle. And under that? Turtles, all the way down.

Imposter syndrome works the same way. You can’t think your way to the bottom. There is no bottom turtle.

So this week, let’s talk about imposter syndrome, what it actually is, why it spirals the way it does, and how you can stop searching for ground that doesn’t exist.

The Loop That Feeds Itself

Infinite regress is when every answer you find just creates another question. Fun right?

It shows up everywhere. In philosophy, it’s the problem of proving anything is true. For example, how do you know that? Well, because of this. But how do you know that? Because of this other thing. And so on and so on. It’s also why people hate philosophy majors.

John Green wrote a pretty great novel called Turtles All the Way Down about a teenager with OCD who gets stuck in these thought spirals. She searches for certainty, for the thing that will make her anxiety stop. But every answer just generates more questions. Every reassurance needs another reassurance.

Imposter syndrome works much the same way.

You start with a simple question: “Do I belong here?” Seems reasonable enough. So you look for proof. You check your credentials, double check the old nametag. You compare your resume to others. But then you think, “Okay, but everybody here has some pretty good credentials.” So you look for what makes you different. Maybe you find something. But then you think, “Maybe that doesn’t count.” So you dismiss that. Then you wonder if dismissing it proves you’re actually unqualified. Round and round.

The trap isn’t the first question. The trap is believing there’s a final answer.

And the longer you search for it, the worse the spiral gets. Because now you’re not just questioning your qualifications. You’re questioning why you’re questioning. You’re anxious about being anxious. You’re stuck in a recursive loop where each ever more desperate attempt to solve the problem becomes part of the problem.

You can’t think your way out because thinking is what creates the trap. It’s rough have a dizzying intellect.

What You Miss While You’re Spiraling

Okay, where was I?

Right. So here’s what happens when you’re stuck searching for the bottom turtle: you end up missing all sorts of stuff.

At that dinner, I spent the cocktail hour in my own head. Just running through all the ways I didn’t measure up. You know what I didn’t do? Actually engage with people. Ask questions. Learn something. Make a connection. I was so busy trying to determine if I belonged that I completely wasted the opportunity to just be there.

That’s a real cost of imposter syndrome. Not that you feel like a fraud. But that the feeling consumes so much mental energy you can’t appreciate what’s actually in right there in front of you.

Of course, there’s a difference between imposter syndrome and healthy self-assessment. Self-assessment is: “I don’t know that much about AI, I should ask some questions and learn.” That’s useful, it moves you forward.

Imposter syndrome is: “I don’t know much about AI and everyone here probably thinks I’m an idiot. Why did they even invite me? Am I capable of learning new things or am I just faking it?” That’s turtle thinking.

One is specific. The other is existential. It’s action vs paralysis.

And while you’re paralyzed, life keeps moving. Conversations happen and opportunities pass. Connections get made. Just not with you. Because you’re too busy asking questions that don’t have answers.

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How to Stop Looking for the Bottom Turtle

So what do you actually do about this?

First, remember what I just said, the goal isn’t to prove you belong. The goal is to be present enough to engage with what’s in front of you.

And here are some other things that actually help:

• Name the spiral when it starts. You don’t have to stop it. You don’t have to solve it. Just notice it. “Oh hey, I’m spiraling again.” The act of naming it can create just enough space for you to get some breathing room in your thoughts.

• Ask a better question. Instead of “Do I belong here?” go with “What can I learn here?” or “Who can I connect with?” These kind of questions actually have answers.

• Adopt a little delulu as the solulu. Sometimes the healthiest response to imposter syndrome is to just decide that you belong and move on. Not because you’ve proven it. Not because you’ve found an answer. But because searching for proof is a waste of time. And because sometimes you just have to believe something that can’t be proven and get on with it.

• Use the discomfort as data, not evidence. At the end of the day, feeling uncomfortable in a room full of people who seem more qualified than you is just information. It tells you you’re in a place where you can learn. It doesn’t tell you that you’re unqualified. It tells you that you’re stretching and you have work to do. That’s not bad, it’s helpful.

• Remember that everyone is winging it. For realsies. The ex-Amazon person? Winging it. The startup founder? Absolutely winging it. The difference is they’re not stuck asking themselves if they should be winging it.

So stop searching. Start participating.

In Conclusion

A few months ago, I got invited to a dinner again with many of the same people. I’d been laid off by then, so showing up felt a little weird. No fancy title. I had my own company name on the name tag. It was just me and whatever I’d learned since the last time.

Which, it turns out, was quite a lot! That first dinner had motivated the hell out of me. I DID NOT want to feel that way again. So I learned. I became a sponge. I started paying attention to what I didn’t know instead of pretending I knew it all. That dinner was eye-opening about how much the company I worked for and I weren’t doing. And in the time since, I’ve come a long way baby. Hell, I even teach classes on AI now.

And yeah, at the next dinner, I still felt the imposter syndrome creep in. But this time I managed to catch it sooner. I named it. I asked better questions and <gasp!> I actually talked to people.

About halfway through the night, I found out that more than a few others there had also been laid off recently as well. They were probably spiraling about the same things I had been.

I bet a lot of us are looking for that bottom turtle. Nobody ever finds it.

Ever forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

Speaking of AI: if you feel a bit behind and want to actually know what people are talking about, check out the AI Morning Minute. One term a day. Less than a minute. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

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Actually, it felt like less than nothing. No insurance. No severance. No paycheck. No unemployment. Just debt and despair.

The reality, of course, was that it wasn’t quite that bad. I mean, it wasn’t great. But I had assets, experience, and amazing support from people who care about me. Still, in those early moments of personal calamity, it felt over. I was underwater. In the negative.

It’s been a few months now and I’m back to zero.

And I don’t mean broke or starting over with nothing. I mean the launchpad. The clean slate where you can finally build something new instead of just repairing what broke. This isn’t empty. It’s potential. It’s the moment right before Peter Falk shows up in your bedroom to tell you the most amazing story ever.

I am here to tell you: this place is amazing.

So this week, let’s talk about starting from zero, why it matters more than we realize, and how you can use it as an advantage instead of a setback.

Why Zero Beats Negative One (Even When Negative Feels Safer)

There’s a massive difference between zero and negative one.

Negative means you’re still losing ground. You’re patching holes and putting out fires. You wake up exhausted because you spent the night reacting instead of building.

But at zero, you have agency again. The crisis is over or at least diminished. You have space to create and to dream and then to act on that dream.

We tend to cling to negative one anyway because somehow it feels safer. It’s familiar and you feel like you know what to expect. The alternative feels more like freefall.

Negative one is the job that’s killing you but pays the bills. The relationship that stopped working years ago but at least you’re not alone. The project that’s failing but you’ve already invested so much time.

Walking away from all that can be a relief. But it’s also terrifying.

The funny thing about working with engineers for decades is that you learn that they count differently than most people.

In kindergarten, you learned to count to five by counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Engineers start at zero. They count 0, 1, 2, 3, 4.

Why? Because in programming, zero is the starting position. It’s not nothing. It’s the foundation. It’s where the array begins. The first slot, not the absence of one.

And this change in mindset (or counting technique if you will) has a way of changing how you see things.

Zero becomes not empty. It’s not failure or the void. Instead, it’s the point where you have a clean slate and infinite possibility.

One is the first step. But zero is the foundation.

When you’re here, you’re not starting over. You’re starting fresh. And those are not the same thing.

A Place of Honesty

At this point, all your options are forward. You can’t fall back to old patterns because there’s nothing to fall back to.

This is why some of the most amazing things can come after catastrophe. Not because suffering is noble, but because it removes the illusion of safety. The boats have been burned, and when you’re able to move past the grief, you get to start asking a different question: “What do I actually want to build?”

This is blue ocean.

Have you heard that term? Blue ocean strategy? It’s when you stop fighting in crowded, competitive markets and instead create new space where the competition doesn’t exist yet. Where you make your own rules.

That’s what this gives you. No old commitments dragging you down. No one expecting you to be who you were six months ago.

This might just be the most honest place you’ll ever find yourself.

You can’t pretend anymore. You can’t coast on momentum that died six months ago. You can’t hide behind a title or a paycheck or a routine that stopped serving you years ago. Inertia makes a lot of our decisions for us. But inertia isn’t interested in what you want. It’s only interested in what’s easy.

You have to decide what you’re actually going to build. And you get to decide based on what matters now in this moment, not what mattered before everything fell apart.

What would you actually build if the old version wasn’t an option? If you couldn’t just patch together what used to work and hope it holds?

That’s not just some thought experiment. It’s this place asking you to be honest with yourself.

It’s not punishment. It’s permission.

The King of Side Quests

My daughter tells me I’m the king of side quests.

Even before I was kicked to the curb, I had signed up to teach a class on AI. I was writing this newsletter. Doing consulting work.

And these days, I’m trying all sorts of stuff. I started up this consulting business. I’m running AI workshops. The teaching is going great. And of course, I bought this police car.

Okay sure, on the outside, this could look like flailing. A man in his fifties flopping around life in a desperate attempt to recapture who he once thought he was.

But the reality is that I haven’t felt this free in a long time.

When I was in my twenties, I didn’t take a gap year. I didn’t backpack around Europe. I didn’t take a bunch of different classes to try on different versions of life. I beelined into adulthood. I went from college to debt and bills to job to career to startup. I’ve always been the steady, responsible adult. The one who made the safe choice, who stayed the course.

But now I’ve been gifted this time of beautiful, terrifying, thrilling, utter bedlam. Older than I’ve ever been and I feel younger than I’ve ever felt.

It’s a playground. And I’m allowed to play.

Oh hey, quick aside: If you’re getting value from this newsletter and want to support what I’m building, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. You’ll get a monthly digital goodie boxes, stickers (yes, actual stickers), and the satisfaction of knowing you helped fund my questionable police car choices.

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Now, I know what you’re thinking. I just told you I’m the king of side quests. I’m doing all the things. Teaching, consulting, workshops, buying police cars. So how does that square with trying to focus?

The difference is that I’m not scattered. I’m experimenting. Each of those things is intentional. Each one is a test. I’m trying on different versions of what comes next to see what fits.

But before you can experiment, you need momentum. And momentum starts with one win.

Maybe you're not at zero yet. Maybe you're still in the negative, still putting out fires, still clinging to what's broken. Try not to beat yourself up about it. You don't have to be ready and it is OK to give yourself time. But when you are ready, these steps will be here waiting.

Whether you’re at rock bottom or ready to rebuild, here’s how to start:

• Get one win. Not ten things. One. Pick something small enough that you can actually finish it this week. One conversation you’ve been avoiding. One email you need to send. One project you’ve been thinking about. One decision you keep postponing. You’re not looking for the perfect move. You’re looking for proof that you can move forward. Psychologist Albert Bandura called this “mastery experience.” Small wins build self-efficacy faster than any pep talk ever could. You don’t believe you can do something because someone told you so. You believe it because you did it once. And if you did it once, you can do it again. And stack those wins. Keep track. They add up faster than you think.

• Stop trying to rebuild what you lost. This may be the hardest part. You’ll want to recreate what you had before. The same job, the same structure, the same comfort. But that’s not moving forward. That’s clinging to negative one. Ask yourself: what would I build if I couldn’t go back? Write it down. Try to be totally honest. Not what sounds impressive. Not what other people expect. What do you actually want?

• Let yourself experiment. Once you have that first win, try something else. And then something else after that. You don’t need a five-year plan right now. You don’t need it all figured out. You need permission to try things that might not work. Some will. Some won’t. That’s not failure. That’s information. That’s how you figure out what fits. I didn’t know teaching AI would feel this good. I didn’t know buying a police car would make me laugh every time I get in it. I just tried things and paid attention to what felt right.

• Give it time, but not too much time. This process is thrilling, but it can also be exhausting. You’ll want to rush. Or you’ll want to freeze. Neither works. Move forward, but don’t expect yourself to have it all solved by next week. This is a process, not a light switch. Give yourself the space to be OK with it all.

Remember: this isn’t nothing. It’s foundational. And from here, you can build anything.

Conclusion

It’s easy to think that zero is nothing. It’s the worst score to get in a game (generally). It’s last place. It’s out of money. It’s out of time. A failing grade. We get taught that you don’t want to end up here.

But for me, the hard part isn’t starting from zero. The hard part is realizing you’ve been clinging to negative one, pretending it’s still something worth saving.

And once you let go of that? Once you stop trying to salvage what’s already gone?

That’s when you realize this is also where possibility lives. It’s where engineers start counting. It’s where the ocean is blue and wide open. It’s the moment right before the story begins.

So if you’re at zero right now? Congrats! That means you’re ready to start.

Ever forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

P.S. Speaking of starting from zero with AI: I’m teaching a beginner-friendly AI workshop online. If you’ve ever felt lost in AI conversations or wanted to understand how to actually use these tools, this is for you. No prior experience needed. Just curiosity and a willingness to try something new. Register here.

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Over the holidays, I got it in my head that I should surprise my wife with a new car. We can’t really afford a new new car. So I went looking for deals on used ones. Flash forward to me sitting up late one night, scrolling through govdeals.com. You know govdeals right? the website where municipalities auction off old equipment. And vehicles.

And before you know it, I’d placed a bid on a 2016 Ford Explorer Police Interceptor.

Somewhere along the way, I deluded myself into thinking that even if I won the auction, they wouldn’t actually make me buy it. Like there’d be some kind of out. Some escape hatch for people who’d made a terrible mistake at 11 PM on a Tuesday.

Dear reader, I am here to tell you that if you win a police car at auction, they very much expect you to buy that police car.

And so now I’m the not-so-proud owner of this vehicle. A car that my wife very much does not want as her everyday driver.

The seats need to be replaced. There are holes drilled into the dashboard. The electrical system looks like spaghetti.

My heart was in the right place. My wife had knee surgery, and driving our car with the manual transmission has been hard for her. So I thought yeah, maybe this could work. Maybe I’d stumbled onto one of those shortcuts people don’t consider. The kind of move that looks dumb until it turns out to be brilliant.

But every morning when I come downstairs and stare out at the car in front of my house, I most definitely do not feel brilliant.

Still, I’m spending a little money and a lot of time trying to fix this thing up. I’m not a mechanic, but I can be handy. ChatGPT has been very helpful. I’ve plugged holes, fixed trim, watched helpful YouTube video. I’m pretty sure a future weekend involves a trip to a junkyard to find seats. You know, as you do.

And yes, this was a fantastically dumb decision. But to be fair, I’m arguably one decision away from someone else’s bad decision making this break even. After all, there’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.

So this week, let’s talk about bold risks, why letting go of outcomes matters, and how there’s a lot to be said for just staying in it for the ride.

Letting Yourself Off the Hook

I felt like an idiot.

The kind of idiot who stays up late bidding on government auctions without a lot of disposable income to throw around at these kind of things. The kind of idiot who has to explain to his wife that he bought a car she didn’t ask for and can’t actually drive yet.

I beat myself up pretty good about it too. Is this what a mid-life crisis looks like? Just scrolling govdeals and Facebook Marketplace at midnight, buying weird stuff I don’t need?

But my wife was great about it.

I mean, she was surprised. So in a way, mission accomplished. But beyond that, she sorta shrugged and said, “Welp, this will be an adventure. Let’s see where it takes us.”

She saw that I felt bad. That I was embarrassed. And she let me off the hook.

More importantly, she let me let myself off the hook.

This all reminded me that you can examine how you got somewhere and you can learn from the mistake. But there isn’t much value in beating yourself up.

The decision is made. The money is spent. That damn police car is parked in front of your house. You can spend your energy wishing you’d been smarter, or you can spend it figuring out what to do next.

And once I stopped beating myself up about it, something in me shifted. I could actually look at the situation clearly. What do I need to fix? What can I learn? What’s actually possible here?

Acceptance isn’t the same as approval. It’s just recognizing that this is where you are now. And from here, you get to decide what happens next.

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What Happens Next?

It’s been a week or so now and I have to admit, I like working on it.

I can’t sell the car until the title arrives. That takes a couple months. And as long as it’s sitting out there, I might as well try to make it good.

Each little thing I fix makes me feel accomplished. That shame and embarrassment slowly turns into adventure. Like I’m leveling up my skills and experiences.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all roses. I managed to shock myself on the car battery. Turns out it wasn’t totally dead. The car has sharp edges, so I’m a bit scratched up here and there.

But I’m learning all sorts of things. And I’m reminding myself that even though I’m impulsive and my decision making might be suspect at times, I’m capable. I can figure things out.

And it’s funny. The people who know me and find out I did this laugh and make fun. But I don’t think they’re really that surprised.

After all, I’m the guy who left a very stable job during the Great Recession to go build a trivia company with his friends. Of course, those “friends” have since stabbed me in the back and I’m unemployed, but let’s not focus on that right now, shall we?

Instead, let’s focus on taking risks and being okay with the consequences.

The question isn’t whether the risk was smart. The question is: now that you’re here, what are you going to do with it?

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Is Being Risk Adverse the Riskier Move?

I know it might not seem like it, but I think of myself as a risk adverse person.

I get that on paper I look like a wild card. But generally I’m conservative. I reason things out. I make lists. I weigh options. But as the rough and tumble of life keeps having its way with me, I’m starting to wonder if avoiding risk is all that it’s cracked up to be.

Perhaps it’s a byproduct of getting older. But I’m beginning to think more and more that I should take more chances. Get a few more scars. Take a few more shocks to the system.

Maybe the blueprint I thought I was supposed to follow isn’t actually leading anywhere safe. Because the thing I keep finding is that a lot of risks seem way scarier before you’re actually dealing with the fallout. And once you’re in it, it’s usually not that bad.

It seemed super scary to leave my stable job in 2009. But I found out that I could build something. It didn’t last, but whatever, I’m surviving.

I was convinced buying this police car was going to ruin me financially and emotionally. And sure, it’s inconvenient and embarrassing. But I’m also learning how to fix cars and having weird adventures with my wife and collecting stories I’ll tell for years.

The catastrophe I imagined never showed up. Sure, there were consequences. But you can work with consequences.

And if that’s true, then what if being too careful is actually the riskier move? Maybe playing it safe guarantees you’ll never know just what you’re capable of.

Because there’s real risk in spending your whole life avoiding mistakes and waking up one day realizing you also avoided everything interesting.

In Conclusion

All of this makes me think about my brother John.

His favorite poem was Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. He’d quote the last lines to me all the time:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

He wouldn’t quote it to congratulate me when things went well. He quoted it when I was doing something that didn’t make sense to anyone else. I think he wanted me to remember that there’s a whole world out there full of different paths. And there’s a ton of value in just picking one and seeing where it goes.

I mean, I don’t know how this police car thing is going to turn out.

I might get it all fixed up and love it. I might sell it and make a few bucks. Maybe I’ll lose money and chalk it up to an expensive lesson about late-night internet auctions.

But I’ve already learned that the door panels of a 2013 Ford Explorer do not fit a 2016 Ford Explorer. And I’ve learned that shame can turn into adventure if you let it.

And looking out at this police car every morning, I think my brother would think it’s pretty funny. He’d probably laugh, shake his head, and ask me what I learned.

Not every risk pays off. But if you let go of the outcome and stay curious about the process, you might walk away with something better than you planned for.

Even if it’s just a story about the time you owned a cop car.

Ever forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

P.S. Quick thing: If you've ever been around folks where everyone's nodding about AI and you're just trying to figure out what a prompt is, I built something for you. It's a 90-minute workshop that covers the AI basics and such. Oh yeah, did I mention I teach this stuff at North Seattle College and run a consulting company?
Anyhoo, it's February 25th if you're interested. Info here.

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It came exactly one week after I lost my job. I had been putting up a good front. Charging forward. Saying all the right things. But then someone from the company texted me. And in that exchange, I broke.

I don’t remember much. But I do remember collapsing in my kitchen, phone in hand, muttering to myself over and over:

It’s okay, I’m okay. It’s okay, I’m okay. It’s okay, I’m okay. It’s okay, I’m okay.

This went on until I realized my wife was holding me. I was on the floor and I was sobbing.

So I dunno if anyone reading this has had a full on actual panic attack, but it isn’t pretty. You get nauseous. You sweat and shake. Your heart races, your chest gets tight, it’s hard to breathe. I could go on, but you get the point. You feel a little like you are dying; you’re not, but it feels like it.

Oh and have I mentioned that I have generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). It used to feel strange to admit this. It felt like a secret I should keep. But about 19% of U.S. adults have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder at some point. And recent surveys show roughly 12-18% report current symptoms. You’re not alone. I’m not alone.

So this week, let’s talk about anxiety

What Anxiety Actually Is (And What It Isn’t)

Alright, so let me begin with what actually happened in my brain when I got that text that sent me into panic mode.

You probably learned about this in high school science class, but as a refresher, let’s talk about your amygdala. It is a small, almond-shaped part of your brain and it is your threat detector. It is constantly scanning everything you experience for danger. When it finds a threat, boom! it hits the alarm.

When this happens, your heart rate spikes and adrenaline floods your system. You’re ready to fight or to run like hell.

And generally this is a good thing. This is what kept our ancestors alive when they ran into predators. The body is doing exactly what it has evolved to do.

But my amygdala wasn’t responding to a dinosaur or a tiger or Gary Busey. It was responding to a text message.

That panic attack was a false alarm of the old survival system. My body thought it was in danger when it wasn’t. And because the amygdala works faster than your rational brain, you can’t really reason your way out of it in the moment. I was amazingly fortunate not to be alone. My wife was there, she held onto me, she talked me down and helped me breathe. That got me through the moment. But it was a bandaid. It doesn't fix what's happening in the brain.

When people have anxiety (as opposed to just good old fashioned heightened concern) the alarm system just goes to eleven. And at times, you may see threats and danger everywhere.

The most mundane things can become a chance for your brain to catastrophize. Your body just kinda stays in a low-grade constant state of alert, burning through energy, waiting for the next threat…it’s great. Juuust so great.

You’re not weak and you’re not broken. Your alarm system is just stuck in the “on” position. And if you happen to be wired this way, well, now you know what you're dealing with.

So what if the goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety completely? What if it’s learning to recognize when your amygdala is giving you useful information versus when it’s just misfiring?

Things That Don’t Work (But People Try Anyway)

So you’ve got anxiety. Now what?

Well, if you’re like me, you probably tried a bunch of things that seemed like they should work but, ya know, did not.

• Ignoring it: Ah the old classic. Just don’t think about it and stay busy. Keep on moving. But ignoring it is like ignoring the check engine light in your car. Eventually, something breaks.

• Avoidance. The dear cousin of ignoring. If certain situations trigger your anxiety, just don’t go to those situations. Problem solved. Except avoidance teaches your brain that those situations really are dangerous. So your anxiety gets worse. And your world gets smaller.

• Just think positive thoughts: I am as plucky as the next guy. I can Ted Lasso with the best of them. But you can’t positive-think your way out of a panic attack. Your amygdala doesn’t care about your gratitude journal. It’s already decided you’re dying.

• Powering through: Basically, rub some dirt on it and get back in there. This was good enough for dad, it should be good enough for you. I really want this to work. It is beyond ignoring it, it is thinking that if you just toughen up or something it’ll all just go away. This doesn’t fix anxiety. It just adds exhaustion on top of anxiety and adds a healthy touch of guilt. Now you’re anxious AND tired. Nice work champ.

• Self Medicating: Alcohol, weed, whatever numbs it for a few hours. Yeah, that’s just borrowing calm from tomorrow. You still have to pay it back. With interest. I'm not saying you can't have a drink to unwind. But using it to manage anxiety? That's a whole other ball of wax.

By and large these don’t work because none of them actually address what’s happening in your brain.

So what does work? Let’s talk about that next.

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What Actually Helps

Alright, so what will actually fix you.

Nothing.

Sorry, but nothing will fix you. Because you are not broken. You need some regulation, but you don’t need fixing. So what can help.

Well…don’t hate me. it’s boring. And you might roll your eyes. But the number one thing is….breathing. You just need to know how.

I know, I know. You've been breathing your whole life, totally self-taught, I get it. But there’s actual science at work here around breath work. When you’re anxious, your breathing gets shallow and your body interprets shallow breathing as danger. You can work around this, by using different breathing techniques.

My go-to is box breathing. Breathe in for four counts. Hold for four. Out for four. Hold for four. Repeat as needed. This has a way of telling your nervous system that you are safe. Another good one is the physiological sigh. Two quick inhales through your nose, then one long exhale through your mouth. It resets your nervous system faster than regular breathing. Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has covered this extensively and it's effective for acute stress.

Of course, if you’re in the middle of a full panic attack, breathing techniques might not stop it completely. Sometimes the train has already left the station. But they can help you ride it out without making it worse. And over time, they can help prevent the next one.

Beyond that, here are a few other things to consider:

• Grounding techniques. Name five things you can see. Four you can touch. Three you can hear. Two you can smell. One you can taste. This pulls you back into your body and out of your spiraling thoughts.

• Daily rituals. Not massive lifestyle changes. Small, predictable moments that tell your brain: this is safe. Morning coffee in the same chair. A walk around the block with the dogs. A few minutes of reading before bed. We are creatures of habit and these habits lend us stability.

• Name it out loud. Say "I'm having anxiety right now." Not to fix it. Just to acknowledge its presence. This little act moves the experience from your amygdala to your prefrontal cortex. You shift from "I'm dying" to "I'm observing that I feel like I'm dying." The idea here isn't to stop feeling anxious. It's to stop believing every anxious thought.

• Get help: Ya know, therapy. Medication. Both if you need both. I was against this for a long time. I thought I should be able to handle it myself and that meds were for people who had it far worse than I did. But anxiety isn't something you can willpower your way out of. It's brain chemistry. And sometimes brain chemistry needs adjustment. I've been on meds for a while now and my baseline has shifted. I still get anxious. But I'm not constantly running hot.

Just know that getting help takes time. And it can be messy. My first round of meds was a disaster. My anxiety monster turned into the Hulk. So my doctor and I had to try another kind, adjust the dosage, and figure it out through trial and error. But it has been so worth it for me.

And maybe most importantly: know you’re not alone. About 31 million American adults have an anxiety disorder. You’re not broken. You’re not weak. Your brain just works this way. And there are a lot of us out here figuring it out together.

None of this is a cure. There isn’t one. But these things help. And help is WAY better than no help. That’s just math folks.

Conclusion

I will probably always have anxiety. I suspect it is just how I am wired.

To add insult to injury, both my kids have anxiety. And my dog. That’s right, even my damn dog has anxiety.

I quoted stats on anxiety earlier, but I often wonder how many people out there are walking around ignoring, self medicating, or just powering through. Quietly miserable. One text message from falling apart.

But you don’t have to wait for a breakdown to start being honest about what you’re feeling. In fact, please don’t wait for a breakdown. Cause unfortunately (at least for me) when a panic attack hits, well the whole day is kaput. All that adrenaline and stress just wiped me out. My focus was shot and I just didn’t feel quite right for the whole rest of the day. And again, I had someone there with me. If you're alone when it hits, breathe. Do your best to ground yourself. Call someone if you can. You don't have to white-knuckle it by yourself.

You can start right now. This moment. Say it out loud if you need to.

Your alarm system might be stuck. But you’re not stuck with it alone. There are a lot of us out here. Doing our best. Figuring things out. Breathing.

It’s okay to not be okay. And it’s also okay to ask for help.

And sometimes, that’s the bravest thing you can do.

Ever forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

If you need help right now:

• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 (available 24/7)

• Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741

• NAMI Helpline: 1-800-950-NAMI (6264) for information and local resources

If you’re looking for a therapist:

• Psychology Today: psychologytoday.com/us/therapists (searchable directory)

• SAMHSA Treatment Locator: findtreatment.gov

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No, I’m not a superhero. I’m not a biologist who’ll cure disease. I’m not a politician who can set policy or change history.

But my 2026 plan is to save the world anyway.

I know, it’s tough to believe, but just so ya know, it’s already in motion.

For example, two days before Christmas, I had a package to mail. If you’ve been in this situation, you know that the post office looks like a lot like the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan. It was utter bedlam.

When I reached the front of the line, the woman behind the counter managed a yawn and I made some comment about her needing a nap.

She laughed ruefully and said, “I’ve been here all day by myself. I’m wiped.”

I finished my business, thanked her, and drove to the closest coffee shop. I bought a peppermint mocha, a strawberry lemon refresher, and a box of cookies. Then I went right back to the post office.

I waited until she finished helping someone, then briefly cut in line with profuse apologies to the young woman in Christmas socks about delaying her shipment.

I told the postal worker I didn’t know if she liked coffee, so I got her both drinks and the cookies. I thanked her for working so hard and said she was like Santa Claus, only better, because Santa only works once a year and I see her here all the time.

She stared at me in shock. (So did Christmas Socks.)

As I left, I heard her shout, “Thank you!”

While I sat in my car checking my messages I saw the young woman I’d cut in front of come out eating a cookie. Apparently the postal worker had shared. Also Christmas Socks stopped to drop a few dollars into the bowl of the homeless vet sitting out front. His name is David. His dog’s name is Pearl.

I left the post office and bought David two tacos and two waters. We chatted about the cold weather, hard times, and better days ahead.

See what I mean? Saving the world.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll think I’m super nice. I’m really not. I’m just on a mission.

So this week, let's talk about why small acts beat grand gestures, whether the world actually needs saving, and how you can start today.

It's All About the Little Things

Ever see the movie The Paper directed by Ron Howard? Great film.

There’s a scene where Martha (played by an always brilliant Marisa Tomei), Henry’s pregnant wife, confronts him about his obsession with work. She poses a hypothetical:

A guy breaks into the apartment with a gun. He says he’ll blow her brains out or blow up the newspaper building. Choose. Now.

An incredulous Henry (played by an also brilliant Michael Keaton) stammers. What do you think I’d say!?!?

And Martha says:

“It is never one big dramatic choice. It is little, vague situations every day, and you’re either there or you’re not. If you keep waiting for the guy with the gun to show up, it will be too late.”

Again, great film, you really should see it. And I think about this scene all the time. Because Martha is right. We’re so conditioned to believe that saving the world requires the one, big moment.

But think about the times someone did something for you. When you thanked them, they probably said, “Oh, it was nothing.” But for you? It was everything.

Shortly after I lost my job and while my wife was recovering from knee surgery, we found a bag on our porch. Inside was a full meal from Whole Foods and a bottle of whiskey. Our lovely, wonderful neighbor had dropped it off without knocking, without waiting for thanks, without making a fuss. She just left it and went home.

That meal wasn’t nothing. That was someone noticing we were struggling and doing something about it.

Most people are waiting for the guy with the gun. The moment that demands heroism or a situation so clear that choosing good becomes obvious.

But again that moment almost never comes.

What comes instead are little, vague situations. A tired worker. A long line. A person sitting outside in the cold. And you are either there or you’re not.

Does the World Need Saving?

Okay, so does the world actually need saving? Yes. It absolutely does.
It always needs saving.

Every generation thinks they're living through the worst of it. Do you think people on the Oregon Trail were like, “Well isn’t this a lovely little trip we’re taking”?

No. It was awful…I assume it was awful. It was a long time ago, and every time I go to Oregon it really is quite a lovely trip. But the point is the world has always been difficult. Life is pain, as someone once said. But that doesn't mean we can't show up for each other anyway.

Time and time again, it feels like the world is falling apart. And that’s partly because we’re wired to notice the negative stuff. I wrote about this before (good stuff go back and read it). But in a nutshell, our brains evolved to spot threats. The news knows this as does social media and your doom-scrolling habit at 11 PM.

Bad news spreads faster than good news. Tragedy gets more clicks than kindness. And somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that caring means being constantly aware of every awful thing happening everywhere all at once.

And you can’t fix everything. But you’re not supposed to fix everything.

Little acts of kindness don’t solve systemic problems. I get that. Buying tacos doesn’t end poverty and something like this won’t show up in any dataset proving I made any measurable progress toward a better world.

But I believe it matters.

Because the world isn’t just systems and statistics. It’s people. Actual people just trying to get through their days. And sometimes the thing that saves someone’s day is remarkably tiny.

So yes, the world needs saving. But perhaps not the way we usually think.

Alright, Now What?

Good question.

It’s not like you should put “save the world” on your calendar between 2 and 3 PM on Thursdays.

Honestly the main thing to do is to just pay attention. To heighten your awareness.

Because the opportunities are there. Everywhere. If you just take a moment and pause you will see them. I bet you walk past a dozen chances every single day. All you need to do is to notice.

Most people don’t see them because they’re moving too fast or thinking too hard or convinced that helping requires more than they have to give.

But it doesn’t. It really doesn’t.

Just start stupid small:

• Hold the door for someone.

• Buy an extra coffee.

• Carry someone’s bag.

• Let someone go ahead of you in line.

• Ask the checkout person how their day is going and actually, truly, really, earnestly, wait for the answer.

When you do this, you begin to build a muscle of sorts. You are building a practice. And practices get stronger the more you do them.

Cause what I have found is that the more you look for these moments, the more you can see them. And the more you act on them, the easier it gets. You kinda wire your brain to notice. Oh, that person could use help. Oh, I could do something about that. Oh, this would only take me thirty seconds.

And then…you just do it.

Because remember that scene from The Paper with Martha: it’s never one big dramatic choice. It’s little, vague situations every day, and you’re either there or you’re not.

The guy with the gun isn’t coming.

But the person who needs coffee? The person who could use five minutes of conversation? The person who just needs someone to notice they exist? The person in the cold?

They’re right there in front of you.

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Conclusion

So there ya have it. I’m gonna save the world.

Which brings me back to what I wrote about last week. This book I’ve been working on: A Daily Kindness: One Small Act of Goodness for Each Day of the Year.

My thought is that if I can provide one daily act of kindness, of goodness, of generosity for myself and for everyone, maybe we can create a movement. Maybe we can look past our ideological differences and just act. Feed children. Clothe those in need. Take a few minutes to see those who feel invisible and help them feel seen.

It’s just a theory.

But it’s one I’m ready to commit to and to write about for months. It’s one I’m ready to act on in those stolen, quiet, almost wasted moments of life that mean very little to me but could be everything to someone else.

So like I said, I am releasing Chapter 1. The one about awareness and learning to notice these kind of moments.

Cause you don’t save the world by planning to save the world. You save it by showing up for one person. By doing one little thing.

Every single time you show up, you’re making a choice and you’re proving to yourself that you’re the kind of person who notices and who acts. And if enough of us do that. If enough of us can manage one small act of goodness every day.

Well, perhaps that’s how you actually save the world. One person. One act. One day at a time.

Wanna join me?

Ever forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

Get Chapter 1 of A Daily Kindness

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If you’re wondering what that chat email (New Message from Derek Pharr) was all about, don’t worry. You’re not going crazy, and I didn’t mean to surprise you.

I just turned on the chat feature for Chief Rabbit subscribers and didn’t realize everyone would get some random message right out of the gate.

Chief Rabbit is hosted on a platform called Substack, and chat is one of its optional features. As it turns out, Substack automatically sends one email when you start your first chat. After that, no more emails unless I specifically choose to send one.

Anyhoo, so what is chat?

It's a space just for Rabbit readers where we can talk about stuff that doesn't quite fit in the newsletter.

Quick questions, random thoughts, updates, etc.

How it works:

Head to substack.com/chat on the web. You’ll see Chief Rabbit there. Jump in and say hi.

Join chat

You can also use the Substack app if you prefer. Just tap the chat icon (two bubbles at the bottom) and you’ll find it.

Chat happens in the app or on the web. Check in when you want.

If you run into any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Looking forward to seeing you there. And sorry again for the extra email.
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

Thanks for being a paid subscriber to Chief Rabbit. Your support truly means the world to me. Each month, you’ll get a small gift from me. Just a thank you for your support. Think templates, tools, reading lists, bonus essays. Practical stuff you can actually use.

Read more

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. I want to write a book. Not someday. Not when I have more time. I actually want to do it soon.

Shortly after I started writing Chief Rabbit, my sister Anne told me I should write a book. I scoffed. I was committed to writing this newsletter each week. Wasn’t that enough? And what would I even write about? My dad and my brother had both written books. One wrote a memoir, the other fiction. I dunno, writing a book just didn’t seem like it was right for me.

But her suggestion got into my head. It hung around. It grew. Every so often I found myself returning to the idea.

And so, one day I finally started. I even came up with a working title.

The book is called A Daily Kindness: One small act of goodness for each day of the year. The first chapter is done. January is about awareness. Learning to notice the quiet moments where kindness can just find a way in. Stuff like holding the door, returning someone’s cart at the grocery store, letting someone jump in line at the grocery store. It’s not all about hanging out at a grocery store I promise.

But I keep putting off Chapter 2.

Not because I don’t know what to write. I more or less do. February is gratitude. March is generosity. I have the outline. I even have some of the stories.

I stall because my brain does the math (stupid math). Twelve chapters. One per month if I’m disciplined. That’s a year from now. Even then, it’s just a first draft. Then comes editing. Design. Publishing. Marketing. And that’s if I even make it that far.

It all feels like forever. So I find other things to do instead.

Turns out, there’s a psychological reason for this. And once you understand it, you can work around it.

So this week, let’s talk about temporal discounting, what it is, why it sabotages big goals, and how you can outsmart it.

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The Science of Why You Can’t Start

First, let’s talk about why this happens in the first place.

Temporal discounting is the psychological tendency to prefer smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards. The further away something is, the less your brain cares about it.

It’s the reason you pick immediate pleasure over long-term benefit. It’s why you doom-scroll at midnight instead of getting to sleep even though you know you’ll hate yourself at 6 a.m. Why you eat the entire sleeve of Oreos instead of saving some for tomorrow. Why “I’ll start on Monday” is the most delicious lie you tell yourself.

The good news? You are not lazy.
The bad news? It’s science.

Your brain evolved to prioritize immediate survival over long-term planning. Ya know, food now beats food later. Your primal self likes to kick in sometimes and take over.

But in our modern world, most of our meaningful goals need us to trade present effort for future payoff. And that trade feels unnatural. Your inner Neanderthal grunts in protest.

When I consider the idea of actually finishing an entire book, my brain sees the gap between here and done. Twelve chapters. Plus an intro and some kind of conclusion. Dozens of small stories. Even more decisions about tone, structure, examples. Lord have mercy, it’s so much.

So I shift to answering emails and organizing stuff. Anything that delivers a quick hit of progress. Stupid dopamine strikes again.

But those quick wins don’t move me toward the thing I actually want.

Temporal discounting doesn’t just delay action. It redirects it. You end up busy but stuck. Productive on tasks that don’t matter and frozen on the ones that do.

And the longer you wait, the worse it gets. Because the future reward stays distant while the present cost stays immediate. See, isn’t science neat!

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How to Make Tomorrow Feel Like Today

Don’t fret. You’re not trapped with your brain’s terrible math. You can actually work around temporal discounting. Here are a few tricks to get you there:

• Shrink the Timeline

  • Your brain blows off rewards that feel far away. But a goal with a deadline in a couple weeks triggers urgency. And it’s not just about adding pressure. It’s about making big things small enough for your brain to actually process. A year-long project is too abstract. A three-week deadline is concrete.

  • When you shrink the timeline, you’re changing how much your future self matters to your present self. A distant goal barely registers. A close goal demands attention.

• Flip Gains Into Losses

  • Your brain cares more about avoiding loss than capturing gain. Like a lot more. So instead of asking “What will I gain by finishing this?” ask “What am I losing by not starting?”

  • Every day you don’t work on the thing is a day you lose. Not someday. Today. That time is gone. And your brain can’t shrug at a loss that’s happening right now.

• Create Public Accountability

  • When you tell someone about a goal, something shifts. The future cost of not doing it becomes immediate.

  • You’ve turned an abstract future goal into a social contract. And when that person circles back and asks, “Hey, how’s that thing going?” you now have real accountability.

Which brings me back to…

One Chapter at a Time

I’ve decided to try something. Instead of focusing on the finished book, I’m going to focus on one chapter. Just one little chapter.

Like I said, I already wrote Chapter 1. So I’m releasing it next week as part of this newsletter. And by talking about all this, letting you know I want to write a book, and putting a piece of it out in the world, it feels like I’m putting something in motion.

Oh, and I’m not giving myself an entire year either.

Instead, I’m committing to one chapter every three weeks. That’s four chapters by the end of February. Eight by April. Twelve by June. Hey, math can be fun!

Three weeks feels doable. My brain can work with three weeks. It can’t discount something that close. Especially if you all know about it.

Because if I tell 30,000+ people I’m writing a book, I kinda have to write the damn book. There’s no hiding behind “I’ll finish it someday.”

This is why public commitments work. They take an obscure future goal and turn it into something you owe someone right now.

If you’re struggling with your own goal or project, you don’t need thousands of people. You just need one or two. Tell a friend. Post it online. Make it real for someone besides yourself.

Conclusion

I still don’t know if A Daily Kindness will be any good. I don’t know if people will read it. I don’t even know if I’ll like it when it’s done.

But I do know this. If I wait for my brain to naturally care about something twelve months away, I’ll never start. Because my brain will keep treating that future reward like someone else’s problem.

So I’m gonna do what I just told you to do. I’m making the future close enough to matter.

Your brain will always try to talk you out of starting, that’s by design. But if you can shrink the timeline, flip the frame, and make it real for someone else, you can start anyway.

So thanks, Anne. You planted this idea. Now I’m finally doing something about it.

Ever forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

P.S. Chapter 1 of A Daily Kindness drops next week. If you have ideas for the other days and chapters, reply and let me know. Holding doors and grocery store acts can only get me so far.

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