Read more

Read more

If you love this content (please share it), but also…

Start here > ​https://newsletter.scottdclary.com​

Check out my ​Podcast​, connect with me on ​YouTube​ / ​Twitter​, and read my ​Weekly Newsletter​

Sponsor: Huel​

Most of my bad food decisions aren’t really about food—they’re about timing. It’s 2pm, I’m between calls, and the choice is: disappear for 30 minutes to make something real, or grab whatever’s fastest and regret it by 4.

Huel Black Edition takes the decision off the table.​ 40g of protein, 27 vitamins and minerals, a genuinely complete meal in about 90 seconds—not a protein shake, actual nutrition for around $5. I keep it on my desk and in my bag, which means the lazy option and the right option are finally the same option.

New customers get 15% off with code SCOTTCLARY at ​huel.com/scott​. Minimum $75 purchase.

This Weeks Letter:

Success Story Podcast

I host a podcast which has 100 million+ downloads.

You should subscribe on ​Apple Podcasts​, ​Spotify​ or ​YouTube​.

Last Week’s Episodes

Ryan Stygar - Author of Get It in Writing (1M+ Followers) | America’s Most Famous Labor Lawyer Reveals What Your Employer Hopes You Never Learn

Ryan Stygar is a prominent labor and employment attorney widely recognized as one of America’s most influential voices on workers’ rights. Known as ‘America’s Most Famous Labor Lawyer,’ he has built a following of over one million people across social media by demystifying workplace law and empowering employees with the knowledge their employers would rather keep hidden. He is the author of Get It in Writing, a practical guide that arms workers with the legal insights and strategies needed to protect themselves on the job. Through his engaging, accessible approach, Ryan has made complex legal concepts approachable for everyday workers — transforming labor law from an intimidating subject into a powerful tool for those who need it most.

Karolina Pelc - BeyondPlay Founder (Acquired by FanDuel) & Author of Her Play | The Real Reason Some People Get All the Breaks

Karolina Pelc is a serial entrepreneur and author best known as the founder of BeyondPlay, an innovative gaming technology company that was acquired by FanDuel. With a track record of building ventures that capture the attention of industry leaders, Karolina has established herself as a pioneering force at the intersection of technology and entertainment. She is also the author of Her Play: The Real Reason Some People Get All the Breaks, in which she shares the strategic insights and unconventional thinking that have defined her entrepreneurial journey. A sought-after voice in business and innovation, Karolina inspires others to recognize and seize the opportunities hiding in plain sight.

See you next week,

Scott

My Links

• Success Story (Top 10 Entrepreneur Podcast)

• 10 Minute Mindset (Top Mindset Podcast)

• Newsletter (321k Subs)

• Social Media

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

There’s a law in economics that explains why the things you’re chasing stop meaning what they meant when you started chasing them.

​Sponsored by LinkedIn Ads​: I get dozens of ads served to me every week. Most of them have nothing to do with me. Wrong industry, wrong stage, wrong everything. They're blowing budget on someone who is never going to convert. That’s the problem with most ad platforms. You’re paying for eyeballs, not the right eyeballs.

LinkedIn Ads flips that. You can target by job title, company size, industry, seniority, skills, even specific companies on your prospect list. You’re not guessing who sees your ad. You’re choosing. And it works. LinkedIn Ads has the highest ROAS of any major ad network at 121%. That’s not a vanity metric. That’s real dollars back on every dollar spent.

If you’re running a startup and want to test it, LinkedIn is offering a $250 ad credit to get started. ​Learn more​ at ​LinkedIn.com/ScottClary​.

In 1975, a British economist named Charles Goodhart noticed something that should have changed how everyone thinks about goals. He was studying monetary policy, watching central banks try to hit specific economic targets, and he observed a pattern: the moment a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The number that was useful when you were just watching it becomes useless the moment you start optimizing for it. Not gradually. Almost immediately. Because once you’re trying to hit a number, you start changing your behavior to serve the number instead of the thing the number was supposed to represent.

This became known as Goodhart’s Law. Economists cite it all the time. Almost nobody applies it to their own life, and that’s where it does the most damage.

How It Works in Small Ways

You start tracking your steps. At first, the number is a useful proxy for how active you are. It reflects your actual movement through the day. Then one night you’re at 9,400 and you pace around your apartment for ten minutes to hit 10,000. You didn’t become more active. You just served the number. The metric stopped measuring your health and started measuring your willingness to game your own system.

You start tracking how many books you read per year. The first few months, it’s a genuine reflection of how much you’re learning. Then you start choosing shorter books because they move the counter faster. You skim the hard parts. You finish books you’re not enjoying because abandoning them would lower your number. The metric that was supposed to measure learning is now measuring completion. Those are different things, but the number doesn’t know that.

These are small, harmless examples. The mechanism is the same one that ruins careers and corrodes entire lives. It just takes longer to see it when the stakes are higher.

How It Works in Bigger Ways

A company decides revenue is the most important metric. Revenue becomes the target. Salespeople start closing deals that aren’t good fits because the deals hit the number. Customer satisfaction drops. Churn increases. The company is growing on paper and rotting underneath, because the metric that was supposed to measure business health started measuring something narrower: the ability to generate short-term cash regardless of what it costs long-term.

A founder decides fundraising is the milestone that proves she’s succeeding. She raises a round. Then another. The company raises $50 million before it has a business model that works. The metric that was supposed to measure progress (investment as validation) corrupted the behavior it was supposed to reflect (building something valuable). She optimized for the fundraise instead of the business, and now she has a well-funded company that doesn’t work.

You’ve seen this play out in organizations you’ve worked in. The moment leadership decides on a KPI, the entire company starts optimizing for that KPI in ways that undermine the reason the KPI existed. Call centers measure average handle time and reps start rushing customers off the phone. Schools measure test scores and the curriculum narrows to whatever is on the exam. The original purpose gets sacrificed to the metric, every time.

The measure becomes the target. The target corrupts the behavior. The behavior destroys the thing you were trying to measure.

Every time. Without exception.

How It Works on Your Life

This is the part I want to spend the most time on, because this is where Goodhart’s Law does its quietest and most permanent damage.

At some point, you picked a number for your life. Maybe it was an income target. Maybe it was a title. Maybe it was a follower count, or a net worth milestone, or a specific house in a specific neighborhood. You picked the number because it represented something. Security. Freedom. Respect. Proof that you’d made it.

Then you started optimizing for the number.

And somewhere along the way, the number stopped representing the thing it was supposed to represent. The income target was supposed to buy you freedom, but the job that pays it costs you 70 hours a week and there’s no freedom in that. The follower count was supposed to validate your ideas, but you stopped sharing your actual ideas months ago because the algorithm rewards something different. You’re creating what performs, not what you believe.

The metric corrupted the behavior. You’re still hitting the number. The number doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

This is Goodhart’s Law running on your life, and it’s so gradual that you don’t notice until you’ve spent years optimizing for a target that stopped representing what you actually wanted a long time ago.

The Goals That Were Never Yours

There’s a version of this that’s even harder to see. Some of the metrics you’re optimizing for were never yours to begin with.

Your parents gave you a number. “Make six figures.” That number represented security in a world where six figures meant something specific. You hit it. It didn’t feel the way you expected. The goalpost immediately moved to $200K, then $500K, each one feeling just as far away as the original did.

Society and your industry gave you metrics too. Own a home by 30, get promoted every two years, hit certain benchmarks by certain ages. You shaped your career around what the system rewards instead of what interests you. You performed for the promotion cycle instead of doing the work that lights you up. And now you’re senior at something you’re not sure you care about, because the metrics were designed by institutions, not by you.

These weren’t your numbers. You inherited them. You absorbed them. You optimized for them so long that you forgot to ask whether they measured anything you value.

What Goodhart’s Law Looks Like From the Inside

I went through this. Not in some dramatic, life-changing way. In the slow, barely noticeable way that’s more common.

I had a revenue target for the business. The number made sense when I set it. It represented growth, sustainability, the ability to hire, the ability to invest in better content. Good reasons. Real reasons.

Then the number became the target. I started saying yes to deals that weren’t aligned because they moved the number. I started spending time on revenue-generating activities that I didn’t enjoy because they hit the metric. The number went up. My enthusiasm went down. The thing the number was supposed to measure, a thriving business doing work I believed in, was eroding while the metric it was supposed to reflect kept climbing.

Gina was the one who noticed. She said something like “you’re hitting all your goals and you seem less happy than when you started.” She was right. The measure had become the target. The target had corrupted the behavior. The behavior was destroying the thing I cared about.

I had to go back and ask a question I should have been asking all along: what is this number actually measuring right now? Not what was it supposed to measure when I set it. What is it measuring today, given how my behavior has changed in pursuit of it?

The answer was uncomfortable. The number was measuring my willingness to do work I didn’t believe in. That’s not what I signed up for.

The Audit Nobody Does

Most people have never done this audit. They set a goal, they pursue it, and they assume the goal still means what it meant when they set it. They never stop to check whether the pursuit has corrupted the purpose.

Try this. Take the goal you’re working hardest toward right now. The one consuming most of your energy. Ask yourself three questions.

What was this goal supposed to give me when I first set it? Be specific. Not “success.” What specifically? Freedom? Creative fulfillment? Security? Respect? Time with my family?

Is my pursuit of this goal currently producing that thing, or is it producing something else? This is where most people get honest for the first time. The goal was supposed to produce freedom. The pursuit is producing obligations. The goal was supposed to produce creative fulfillment. The pursuit is producing algorithmic content. The goal was supposed to produce time with family. The pursuit is consuming every evening.

Did I set this goal, or did someone else set it for me? This one takes longer to answer because most inherited goals feel like your own. You’ve been pursuing them so long that the origin is invisible. But if you trace the goal back to its source, some of them will lead to a parent, a culture, an industry, a peer group. Not to you.

If the pursuit is no longer producing what the goal was supposed to represent, the goal has been corrupted by Goodhart’s Law. You’re optimizing for a number that stopped meaning what you think it means. And the longer you keep going without recalibrating, the wider the gap gets between the metric and the life you want.

The Recalibration

The answer isn’t to stop setting goals. Goals are useful. Metrics are useful. Measurement is useful. The answer is to periodically check whether the measure still reflects the thing it’s supposed to measure, or whether your behavior has shifted so far in pursuit of the number that the number has become meaningless.

The people I’ve talked to who seem most at peace with their ambition are the ones who do this regularly. They don’t just ask “am I hitting my targets?” They ask “do my targets still mean what they used to mean?” And when the answer is no, they change the target instead of grinding harder against a metric that’s lost its meaning.

Goodhart’s Law says the moment a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. What it doesn’t say, but what I think is equally true, is that most people never go back and check. They set the target and they chase it for years, sometimes decades, without ever asking whether the thing they’re chasing still represents the thing they want.

You might be working harder than ever right now to hit a number that means less than it did when you started. That’s worth checking. Probably today.

Thank you for reading,

Scott

My Links

• Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast)

• 10 Minute Mindset (Top Self Development Podcast)

• Newsletter (321k Subs)

• Social Media

The Idea

There’s a study on organ donation that accidentally explains how most people build their lives.

Countries where organ donation is opt-out have participation above 90%. Countries where it’s opt-in sit below 15%. Same people, same decision. The only difference is which option requires you to act and which one lets you do nothing.

The researchers called it the default effect, and the idea goes way beyond organ donation.

Look at your own week. How much of it did you choose, and how much of it just became your life because it was there and you never got around to changing it? The job that was offered, the apartment that was easy, the routine someone else set for you. They weren’t your best options. They were just the ones that didn’t require you to choose something different.

Most people think they designed their life, but they just never opted out of the one that was handed to them.

Quote

“If you can’t decide, the answer is no. If two courses of action are equally balanced, choose the one that’s harder in the short term.” — Naval Ravikant (​The Almanack of Naval Ravikant​. Free to read online.)

Question

If you rebuilt your week from scratch today, how much of the current one would you put back on purpose?

Listen

​Bear Grylls: Why Making It Nearly Destroyed Him​.

I had Bear Grylls on the pod this week. Everest at 23, SAS, 18 million books, a decade of global TV. All built on one trait: the ability to endure more than anyone around him.

He told me the same drive that built all of it nearly cost him his mental health and his closest relationships. He calls it the hustle trap.

The way I understood it: when you wire yourself to push through everything, you don’t get to choose when it turns off. You push through the hard days at work, but you also push through the dinner where your kid needs you to be there and the weekend where your partner just needs you to be present instead of productive. The trait doesn’t know the difference. It just pushes.

Read

​Meditations by Marcus Aurelius​.

The most powerful man on Earth kept a private journal and almost every entry is about one thing: controlling his own reactions. His biggest daily struggle wasn’t the politics or the wars. It was himself.

We live in an era where everything is designed to provoke a reaction from you. Aurelius was dealing with his own version of that two thousand years ago, and what he wrote for himself still works.

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my ​Podcast​, and connect with me on ​YouTube​ / ​Twitter​.

— Scott

If you love this content (please share it), but also…

Start here > ​https://newsletter.scottdclary.com​

Check out my ​Podcast​, connect with me on ​YouTube​ / ​Twitter​, and read my ​Weekly Newsletter​

Sponsor: Huel​

Most of my bad food decisions aren’t really about food—they’re about timing. It’s 2pm, I’m between calls, and the choice is: disappear for 30 minutes to make something real, or grab whatever’s fastest and regret it by 4.

Huel Black Edition takes the decision off the table.​ 40g of protein, 27 vitamins and minerals, a genuinely complete meal in about 90 seconds—not a protein shake, actual nutrition for around $5. I keep it on my desk and in my bag, which means the lazy option and the right option are finally the same option.

New customers get 15% off with code SCOTTCLARY at ​huel.com/scott​. Minimum $75 purchase.

This Weeks Letter:

Success Story Podcast

I host a podcast which has 100 million+ downloads.

You should subscribe on ​Apple Podcasts​, ​Spotify​ or ​YouTube​.

Last Week’s Episodes

Bear Grylls - Adventurer, Fmr SAS & 18M+ Books Sold | Why Making It Nearly Destroyed Him

Bear Grylls is one of the world’s most recognized adventurers and survival experts, best known for his decade-long run as host of Man vs. Wild and his record as the youngest Briton to summit Everest at 23. A former member of the British SAS, he has built a global media empire, authoring over 90 books that have sold more than 18 million copies. Yet behind the fearless persona is a candid admission: the relentless pursuit of success and identity through achievement nearly cost him his mental health and closest relationships — a journey he now shares openly.

Eric Ries - Author of The Lean Startup (5M+ Copies Sold) | The Man Who Wrote The Lean Startup Says the Whole System Is Broken

Eric Ries is the entrepreneur and author behind The Lean Startup, the framework that has sold over five million copies and reshaped how startups and enterprises build products. He introduced the “minimum viable product” and iterative, customer-driven development. His latest book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, tackles what causes thriving organizations to lose their way — and what separates the rare few that sustain greatness over time.

See you next week,

Scott

My Links

• Success Story (Top 10 Entrepreneur Podcast)

• 10 Minute Mindset (Top Mindset Podcast)

• Newsletter (321k Subs)

• Social Media

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

The advice was right when they gave it. The world changed. The advice didn’t. And you can’t let go of it because letting go feels like betraying the people who love you most.

My dad told me to get a good job at a good company and stay there.

He wasn’t wrong. He was speaking from 30 years of lived experience in a world where that advice worked. Where loyalty was rewarded with pensions and promotions, where a degree guaranteed a career, where staying at one company for two decades was smart, not stagnant. The path from college to retirement was linear enough that you could see the whole thing from the starting line.

He gave me the best advice he had. It was built from everything he knew about how the world worked. And everything he knew was accurate, for the world he grew up in.

That world doesn’t exist anymore.

The average person now changes jobs every 2.7 years. Pensions are gone. A degree opens fewer doors than it used to and costs ten times more. The fastest-growing careers didn’t exist a decade ago and the most valuable skills aren’t taught in any school. The path from start to retirement isn’t a line anymore. It’s a web, and nobody standing at the beginning can see where it leads.

But the advice persists. Get a stable job, buy a house early, don’t take risks, save for 40 years and retire. The advice was designed for a world that rewarded obedience and punished deviation. We now live in a world that rewards adaptation and punishes rigidity. And millions of people are still following the old map because the person who drew it is someone they love.

Subscribe now

The Map and the Territory

Naval Ravikant said something that stuck with me: “The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.”

He’s right. But I think the reason most people haven’t figured it out isn’t ignorance. It’s loyalty. They’re not following the old career map because they don’t know a new one exists. They’re following it because the person who handed them the old map is their mother, their father, the person who sat with them when they were scared and said “here’s how the world works” with so much love that the advice and the love became the same thing.

That fusion is the problem. Not the advice itself. The fusion between the advice and the person who gave it.

When your dad says “get a stable job,” he’s not making an economic argument. He’s saying “I don’t want you to struggle the way I did.” When your mom says “don’t take risks,” she’s not giving career advice. She’s saying “I’m scared of what happens to you if this doesn’t work out.” The words are tactical. The meaning is emotional. And you absorbed both, the tactic and the emotion, as a package you’ve never separated.

So when the world changes and the tactical advice becomes outdated, you can’t discard it. Because discarding the advice feels like discarding the love behind it. Ignoring “get a stable job” doesn’t feel like a career pivot. It feels like telling your dad that his 30 years of experience don’t matter. That the thing he worked his whole life to build and then handed to you as wisdom isn’t worth following.

Nobody wants to have that conversation. So they follow the map.

The Guilt Tax

There’s a specific tax that people pay for going against their parents’ advice. Not a financial tax. An emotional one. I think of it as the guilt tax, and it’s one of the most expensive invisible costs in anyone’s career.

Read more

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

New job, new city, new relationship, same patterns. The fresh start feels like progress until six months later when everything looks exactly like what you left.

​Sponsored by LinkedIn Ads​: I get dozens of ads served to me every week. Most of them have nothing to do with me. Wrong industry, wrong stage, wrong everything. They're blowing budget on someone who is never going to convert. That’s the problem with most ad platforms. You’re paying for eyeballs, not the right eyeballs.

LinkedIn Ads flips that. You can target by job title, company size, industry, seniority, skills, even specific companies on your prospect list. You’re not guessing who sees your ad. You’re choosing. And it works. LinkedIn Ads has the highest ROAS of any major ad network at 121%. That’s not a vanity metric. That’s real dollars back on every dollar spent.

If you’re running a startup and want to test it, LinkedIn is offering a $250 ad credit to get started. ​Learn more​ at ​LinkedIn.com/ScottClary​.

I know a guy who’s on his fourth career in seven years.

Left the first job because the culture was toxic. Left the second because his boss didn’t value him. Left the third because the company was “going in the wrong direction.” Each time, the story was the same: this isn’t working, I need a fresh start, the next one will be different.

Each time, the next one was different for about four months. New office, new people, new energy. That honeymoon window where everything feels like possibility and the old problems feel like they belonged to the old place.

Then the patterns crept back. The same conflicts with authority, the same feeling of being undervalued. By month six, he was venting about the new job in the exact same language he used to describe the last one.

He’s convinced he keeps choosing bad companies. He’s never considered that he might be the thing he keeps bringing with him.

The Seduction of the Fresh Start

Fresh starts are intoxicating. They carry a specific kind of hope that almost nothing else in life can match.

When you start a new job, you get to be anyone. The patterns from the old place don’t exist here. Nobody knows about the conflict with your old manager. Nobody knows about the reputation you built or the habits you fell into. The slate is clean. And for a few months, you operate differently because the environment is different and you’re motivated and everything is new.

Same thing happens with cities. You move and for a while, everything feels lighter. The new neighborhood, the new coffee shop, the new commute. The problems you had in the old city feel like they belonged there, like they were geographically specific.

Same thing with relationships. The new person doesn’t trigger the old patterns. For a while. Then they do. Because the patterns weren’t about the last person. They were about you.

The fresh start is seductive because it gives you real, temporary relief from your patterns. The relief is genuine. You do feel better. The problem is that the relief has a shelf life of about three to six months, which is roughly how long it takes for your default behaviors to reassert themselves in any new environment.

After that, you’re living the same life in a different building.

The Common Denominator

There’s a test that nobody wants to take. If the same problem keeps showing up in different contexts, the problem isn’t the context.

If every boss you’ve had was terrible, the variable isn’t the boss. If every relationship ended with the same communication breakdown, the variable isn’t the partner. The variable is you.

You are the common denominator. And the common denominator travels.

This is the thing people spend years avoiding. Because admitting that you’re the pattern is harder than blaming the environment. The environment is external. You can leave it. You are internal. You can’t leave yourself. You’re the one piece of luggage you can’t abandon at the old apartment.

My friend who’s on his fourth career? The pattern is always the same. He joins with enthusiasm, starts pushing for changes before he’s earned the trust to push, alienates the people above him, interprets their pushback as them “not getting it,” and leaves feeling unappreciated. Four different companies. Identical arc. The script runs the same way every time because he wrote the script, not the companies.

He doesn’t see this. That’s the cruelest part. The patterns you carry are invisible to you precisely because they’re yours. They feel like reality, not like patterns. “My boss doesn’t value me” feels like an observation about the boss. It doesn’t feel like a pattern you’ve been running for a decade across four different bosses.

The Honeymoon Mask

The reason you don’t catch the pattern during the fresh start is that the honeymoon period masks it.

In the first few months of any new situation, you’re operating on adrenaline and novelty. You’re more patient because nothing has frustrated you yet, more agreeable because you want to make a good impression. Everything is new enough that your default patterns stay suppressed.

This version of you is real but temporary. It’s you without accumulated baggage. And it feels like the real you, which is what makes the fresh start so convincing. “See? I’m not the problem. Look how well I’m doing in this new place.”

But the version without baggage isn’t sustainable because baggage accumulates. Frustrations build and disappointments stack and the novelty fades. As the environment stops being new, your default patterns stop being suppressed. The patience you had on day one runs out. The agreeableness disappears. And suddenly you’re operating exactly the way you did at the end of the last situation.

By month six, you’re you again. The version that showed up at the end of the last job, the last relationship, the last city. And you look around at this new place and think “this is broken too” without realizing that the thing that broke it arrived on your first day and has been unpacking ever since.

What You’re Running From

In addiction recovery, there’s a concept called the geographic cure. The idea that moving to a new city will fix your problems. Addicts do this constantly. “The problem is this town. These people. This environment. If I just start over somewhere new, everything will be different.”

It never works. Because the addiction travels with the addict. The new city has different bars but the same person walking into them.

You don’t have to be an addict for this principle to apply. Everyone has their version of the geographic cure. Switching jobs to escape a pattern instead of examining it. Ending a relationship because growth felt harder than a fresh start. The details change. The mechanism is identical.

The fresh start isn’t the solution. The fresh start is the escape. And the distinction matters because one leads to change and the other leads to repetition.

I’ve done this. More than once. Early in my career I left a position convinced the problem was the company. Got to the next company and within six months I was having the same frustrations. Same feeling of not being heard. Same resentment about how things were run. It took me leaving twice before I sat with the uncomfortable possibility that the common thread wasn’t the companies. It was me and how I operated inside companies.

That was the hardest admission of my career. Not because it was devastating. Because it was obvious. And I’d been looking past it for years because looking at it meant I couldn’t fix the problem by leaving anymore. I had to fix it by changing.

The Pattern Audit

Most people have two or three core patterns they carry from situation to situation. They’ve never named them because naming them requires the kind of honesty that fresh starts are specifically designed to avoid.

Take a few minutes this week and do something uncomfortable. Look at the last three jobs, or relationships, or living situations you left. Write down why you left each one. Be specific.

Now look at what you wrote. Are there overlapping themes? A type of conflict that keeps appearing in different settings, or a frustration that keeps getting described in different language but feels identical underneath?

If the themes repeat, that’s your pattern. Not the environment’s pattern. Yours. And that pattern will follow you to the next job, the next relationship, the next city unless you address it here, in the place where it’s currently running.

The pattern usually comes down to one of a few things. How you handle conflict and how you respond to authority. What you do when you feel unseen or frustrated. How you behave when the honeymoon period ends and the real work of sustaining something begins.

These aren’t personality flaws. They’re learned behaviors that made sense at some point in your life and now run on autopilot in situations where they no longer serve you. The guy who pushes for change before earning trust probably learned early that nobody would listen unless he was loud. It worked somewhere. It doesn’t work everywhere. But the behavior keeps running because nobody told it to stop.

Starting Different

Starting over is easy. Starting different is the work.

Starting over means changing the scenery and hoping the new view fixes the old patterns. Starting different means keeping the scenery and changing what you do in it. One feels exciting. The other feels tedious. One gives you the rush of a fresh start. The other gives you the slow, unglamorous progress of growing.

The people I’ve interviewed who built something lasting didn’t do it by finding the perfect environment. They did it by becoming the kind of person who could function in imperfect ones. They identified their patterns, named them, and did the uncomfortable work of operating differently even when the old way felt more natural.

This doesn’t mean you should never leave a job, a relationship, or a city. Sometimes the environment is the problem. Bad bosses and toxic cultures are real. The question is whether you’re leaving because the situation is wrong or because your pattern ran its course and the exit feels easier than the examination.

If you’ve left the same kind of situation more than twice, the answer is probably the second one.

The Luggage Test

Before your next fresh start, try something. Instead of listing everything wrong with the current situation, list what you contributed to it going wrong.

Not what was done to you, but what you did. How you showed up and where your behavior created or escalated the problem you’re now running from.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about information. Because if you can name what you contributed, you can change it. And if you change it before you leave, you might discover that the situation isn’t as broken as you thought. That some of what felt like the environment’s failure was your pattern playing out on schedule.

And if you still decide to leave, at least you’ll leave having addressed the pattern. So the next start isn’t just new. It’s different.

Because new wears off. Different is the only thing that lasts.

Thank you for reading,

Scott

My Links

• Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast)

• 10 Minute Mindset (Top Self Development Podcast)

• Newsletter (321k Subs)

• Social Media

Read more

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

Sponsor: DeleteMe — Remove your personal data from the web before someone uses it against you. Trusted for 15+ years by Fortune 500s and government agencies. Get started here.

The things that eventually break you almost never arrive all at once. They build up slowly, in silence, while you’re paying attention to something else entirely.

Nobody has a heart attack on the first bad meal. Nobody goes bankrupt on the first unnecessary purchase.

The damage is never the event. It’s the accumulation that preceded it. Hundreds of small things piling up in silence, ignored because each one individually seemed too minor to bother with. Then one day something breaks and everyone asks “what happened?” as if it was sudden.

It wasn’t sudden. It was years of quiet buildup that finally crossed a threshold. And by the time it crossed, the cost of fixing it was ten times what it would have been if someone had caught it early.

This is how most problems work. Not with a warning. Not with a bang. With a slow, silent accumulation you never notice because you’re too busy paying attention to whatever’s loudest.

The Things That Build While You’re Not Looking

Your health doesn’t collapse in a moment. It erodes across thousands of small decisions you stop tracking. The sleep you skipped last month didn’t feel significant. Neither did the checkup you’ve been rescheduling for a year. But those things stack. And by the time the body sends a signal loud enough to get your attention, it’s been building for a long time.

Relationships work the same way, just slower. Not the dramatic fight. The quiet drift. You stopped asking real questions. Stopped paying attention when they talked about their day. Chose your phone over the person in front of you, once, then again, then as a habit. No single moment is the problem. The pattern is. And patterns are invisible until they’ve done enough damage to become obvious.

Finances do it too. The subscription you forgot about. The lifestyle creep you never consciously chose. The savings account you meant to open six months ago. None of it feels urgent on any given Tuesday. All of it compounds in the background.

The principle is the same everywhere: the most dangerous things in your life aren’t the ones demanding your attention right now. They’re the ones that haven’t demanded anything yet.

Why Your Brain Ignores It

There’s a reason accumulation problems are so deadly. Your brain is designed to respond to sudden threats. A crisis at work grabs your attention. So does a fight with your partner or an overdraft notification.

But the things that accumulate don’t grab anything. They sit there. Quietly. Getting worse by fractions so small they don’t register as change. Skipping one workout doesn’t feel like a health decision. Neither does postponing one conversation or ignoring one bank statement.

So your brain files it as “not a problem right now” and goes back to whatever’s on fire. And the quiet thing keeps building.

I’ve watched this in my own life. I’m good in a crisis. Give me a deadline, an emergency, a fire to put out, and I’ll handle it. But the quiet things? The annual checkup I keep rescheduling. The financial review I keep pushing to next month. The friendship that’s slowly drifting because neither of us has picked up the phone. Those accumulate because they never feel urgent enough to prioritize over whatever’s screaming.

And one day the quiet thing becomes the loud thing. And by then, it’s expensive to fix. Sometimes impossible.

The Accumulation You’ve Definitely Never Checked

I can say with near certainty that there’s one accumulation problem you’ve never looked at. Not because you’re careless. Because you don’t know it exists.

Your personal information is sitting on the open web right now. Not because you put it there. Because it accumulated the same way everything else accumulates: silently, one small piece at a time, over years of just existing online.

Every form you filled out, every service you signed up for, every property you purchased. It’s all been scraped by data broker companies, aggregated into a profile, and made searchable. Sometimes for a fee. Sometimes for free.

I checked mine about a year ago. I expected to find my name and maybe an old email address. What I found was my home address, every phone number I’d used in the last decade, family members’ names, property records, estimated income. Hundreds of data points on dozens of sites I’d never heard of.

I hadn’t done anything wrong. I’d just been online for 15 years. The data accumulated the same way a neglected health problem accumulates. Quietly. In the background. One piece at a time. Until the total was staggering.

The average person has hundreds of exposed data points. If you run a business or have any kind of public presence, it’s worse. The average business owner has over 600 pieces of personal information on the open web. 90% have their home address discoverable. And unlike a forgotten subscription or a skipped checkup, this accumulation has real teeth. Attacks using personal data are 5 times more likely to succeed. The average incident costs small businesses over $120,000. One in four will be impacted this year.

But you don’t need to run a business for this to matter. Identity theft. Phishing. Impersonation. Stalking. All of it starts with personal data that accumulated without your knowledge and sits there waiting to be used by someone who isn’t you.

DeleteMe is what I used to deal with this. They find your personal information across data broker sites and remove it. Then they keep monitoring because the data comes back, and they remove it again. Fortune 500 companies and government agencies have trusted them for over 15 years. It took me about 10 minutes to set up and reduced my exposure by roughly 95%. The kind of accumulation problem that builds over years and takes minutes to fix once you know it’s there. If you want to protect yourself and your business, use my link joindeleteme.com/ssp-biz and they’ll give you a year of social media protection absolutely free.

The Only Defense Against Accumulation

The only thing that stops accumulation is attention. Periodic, deliberate attention to the things that don’t scream for it.

I started doing quarterly audits on the areas of my life where problems build in silence. Not a massive overhaul. An hour or two where I look at the things I’ve been ignoring. The health signals I’ve been dismissing. The financial drift I haven’t tracked. The relationships I’ve been neglecting. The personal data I hadn’t checked until a year ago.

The value isn’t in the time spent. It’s in the act of looking at something you’ve been ignoring. Because accumulation thrives on inattention. The moment you pay attention, you catch the problem while it’s small. Before it compounds into the crisis that makes you wish you’d looked sooner.

The person who catches these things early pays a small cost. A checkup. A hard conversation. A financial adjustment. Ten minutes setting up a service that scrubs your personal data from the web. Small investments that prevent problems you’d rather not imagine.

The person who waits pays a massive cost. And they always say the same thing: “I should have dealt with this sooner.” They’re right. They should have. But the problem never felt urgent until it was.

The Whisper

Every accumulation problem starts as a whisper. A quiet signal that doesn’t demand attention. The workout you skipped and the bank statement you didn’t open. The conversation you keep meaning to have. The personal data sitting on sites you’ve never visited.

The whisper is easy to ignore because there’s always something louder. Something more urgent. Something that feels more important right now.

Then the whisper becomes a scream. And by the time it’s screaming, the cost of dealing with it has multiplied by a factor you don’t want to think about.

Most people spend their lives responding to screams. Putting out fires. Reacting to whatever got loud enough to demand attention. The people who build the most resilient lives are the ones who listen to the whispers. Who check the things that haven’t broken yet. Who look at the accumulation before it becomes the crisis.

Not because they’re paranoid. Because they understand something most people learn too late: the things that build in silence are the things that eventually break in public. And the time to deal with them is right now, while they’re still quiet enough to fix cheaply.

What’s accumulating in your life right now that you haven’t looked at?

Maybe your health needs a check you’ve been putting off. Maybe there’s a conversation you’ve been avoiding with someone who matters. And your personal data is almost certainly sitting on the open web, exposed, accumulating, waiting.

DeleteMe handles that last one. They remove your data and keep it removed. Every subscription comes with a free year of social media privacy protection. If there’s one accumulation problem you can fix in the next ten minutes, this is it.

The rest is up to you. But start with the whispers. They’re trying to tell you something.

Thank you for reading,

Scott

My Links

• Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast)

• 10 Minute Mindset (Top Self Development Podcast)

• Newsletter (321k Subs)

• Social Media

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

The Sunday Scaries aren’t about the calendar. They’re a diagnostic tool you’ve been ignoring for years.

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

Every Sunday around 4pm, a feeling used to settle into my chest.

Not anxiety exactly. Something duller. A weight. The weekend was winding down and Monday was approaching and my body knew it before my brain would admit it. I’d start scrolling my phone more. Getting shorter with Gina. Finding reasons to stay busy so I wouldn’t have to sit with the feeling.

I called it the Sunday Scaries, like everyone does. Treated it like a personality trait. Something that just happens to people who work hard. A universal tax on being an adult. You enjoy your weekend, you dread Monday, you push through. That’s how it works.

For years I never questioned it. I just managed it. Wine on Sunday night. A show to distract myself. A mental rehearsal of the week that somehow made it feel more manageable even though it never did.

Then one Sunday, Gina asked me something simple that I wasn’t ready to hear. “If you dread going back to your life every single week, why do you keep building the same one?”

I didn’t have an answer. Not because the question was complicated. Because the answer was obvious and I’d been avoiding it for a long time.

Subscribe now

The Diagnostic You’re Ignoring

The Sunday Scaries aren’t a personality trait. They’re information.

Your body is telling you something your mind refuses to process during business hours. It’s telling you that the life you go back to on Monday isn’t a life you want to be living. Not the whole life. Maybe just parts of it. But specific, identifiable parts that you’ve been tolerating for so long they’ve started to feel permanent.

Most people treat the Sunday feeling like weather. It just happens. You can’t control it. You can only endure it and wait for it to pass.

But it’s not weather. It’s a diagnostic. A weekly signal from your nervous system that says “something about how you spend your waking hours is wrong.” And instead of reading the diagnostic, you pour a glass of wine and put on Netflix.

I did this for years. The signal came every Sunday. I medicated it every Sunday. And on Monday morning I walked back into the thing the signal was warning me about and did it again for five days until the weekend offered 48 hours of relief that evaporated by 4pm Sunday.

The cycle is so common that we’ve normalized it. We’ve built an entire culture around dreading Monday and celebrating Friday, as if that’s just what working life feels like. TGIF isn’t a joke. It’s a confession that millions of people have built lives they need to escape from twice a week.

You Built This

The part people don’t want to sit with: nobody forced you into this Monday.

The job you’re going back to? You applied for it, interviewed, and accepted the offer. You chose it, or at minimum you chose to stay in it after the first year made it clear what it was.

The schedule that eats your evenings? You agreed to it. Explicitly or implicitly, by not pushing back, by not setting a boundary, by not saying “this doesn’t work for me.”

The commute, the meetings, the workload, the culture, the people you spend 40 hours a week with? All part of a structure you either built or consented to, one decision at a time, over years.

This isn’t blame. It’s ownership. And ownership is the only thing that gives you the power to change it.

Because if Monday just happens to you, like weather, then you’re powerless. You can only endure it. But if Monday is something you built, then you can rebuild it. The same agency that got you into this structure is the agency that can get you out.

Most people skip this step because ownership hurts more than victimhood. Saying “I hate Mondays” is easy. Saying “I built a Monday I hate and I’ve been choosing it every week for three years” is something else entirely.

What Monday Is Measuring

When I finally sat with Gina’s question, I tried to get specific about what I was dreading. Not “Monday” in the abstract. The specific elements of Monday that made my chest tighten on Sunday afternoon.

Read more

If you love this content (please share it), but also…

Start here > ​https://newsletter.scottdclary.com​

Check out my ​Podcast​, connect with me on ​YouTube​ / ​Twitter​, and read my ​Weekly Newsletter​

Sponsor: Huel​

I skipped lunch three times last week. Not because I wanted to—back-to-back calls, no time, and my options were: waste 30 minutes prepping, grab drive-thru garbage, or just stay hungry. By 3pm I’m making terrible decisions because my blood sugar’s crashed and I can’t focus.

​Huel Black Edition fixes this.​ 35 grams of protein, 27 vitamins and minerals—it’s a complete meal, not a protein shake. Under $5, zero prep, and I’m not losing my afternoon to hunger brain.

New customers get 15% off with code SCOTTCLARY at ​huel.com/scott​. Minimum $75 purchase.

This Weeks Letter:

Success Story Podcast

I host a podcast which has 100 million+ downloads.

You should subscribe on ​Apple Podcasts​, ​Spotify​ or ​YouTube​.

Last Week’s Episodes

Lisa Song Sutton - 8-Figure Entrepreneur & Venture Capitalist | How to Build Multiple Businesses From Scratch With No Experience

Lisa Song Sutton is a serial entrepreneur, real estate investor, and venture capitalist who launched multiple eight-figure businesses from scratch — starting with Sin City Cupcakes in 2012, then expanding into shipping, swimwear, and luxury real estate — all while working full-time at a law firm with no prior business experience. A daughter of a U.S. Air Force Vietnam War veteran, she now serves as General Partner of The Veteran Fund, a $20M venture capital fund investing in veteran-led companies. A member of the Young Presidents’ Organization, former Global Shaper selected by the World Economic Forum, and named a Top Ten Social Entrepreneur to Watch by Inc., Lisa is a living proof that bold action and a willingness to learn on the fly can turn an idea into an empire.

Will Harlow - Over-50s Specialist Physio (1.6M+ YouTube Subscribers) | Why Everything Your Doctor Told You About Aging Is Wrong

Will Harlow is a physiotherapist who became one of the biggest health creators on the internet. He started HT Physio in 2018 as a small clinic focused on helping people over 50 move better and live without pain. Then he started posting what he knew on YouTube. That channel now has over 2 million subscribers and 148 million views. His first book, Thriving Beyond Fifty, became a Sunday Times bestseller. His new book, Independence for Life (2026), lays out a step-by-step system built on four pillars (strength, mobility, balance, and skeletal health) to help people build a plan that actually keeps their body working long-term. The whole thing is built around one idea most doctors won’t say out loud: physical decline after 50 is not inevitable, and most of what people accept as “just aging” is actually fixable.

See you next week,

Scott

My Links

• Success Story (Top 10 Entrepreneur Podcast)

• 10 Minute Mindset (Top Mindset Podcast)

• Newsletter (321k Subs)

• Social Media

Read more

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

At some point, the earning and the enjoying diverged. You kept optimizing for one and forgot the other existed.

​Sponsored by LinkedIn Ads​: I get dozens of ads served to me every week. Most of them have nothing to do with me. Wrong industry, wrong stage, wrong everything. They’re burning budget on people who were never going to convert. That’s the problem with most ad platforms. You’re paying for eyeballs, not the right eyeballs.

LinkedIn Ads flips that. You can target by job title, company size, industry, seniority, skills, even specific companies on your prospect list. You’re not guessing who sees your ad. You’re choosing. And it works. LinkedIn Ads has the highest ROAS of any major ad network at 121%. That’s not a vanity metric. That’s real dollars back on every dollar spent.

If you’re running a startup and want to test it, LinkedIn is offering a $250 ad credit to get started. ​Learn more​ at ​LinkedIn.com/ScottClary​.

A guy I know bought his dream house last year.

He’d been working toward it for a decade. Saving aggressively, turning down vacations, saying no to weekends off for years. The house was the goal. The tangible proof that all the sacrifice was worth it. Four bedrooms, a backyard, a home office with a view. Everything he’d been picturing since his late twenties.

He moved in on a Saturday. By Monday he was back at his desk working 12-hour days. I asked him a few months later how the house was. He laughed in a way that wasn’t really laughing and said “I wouldn’t know. I leave before sunrise and come home after dark. The nicest room in the house is the one I see the least.”

He’d spent a decade earning the house. He didn’t have the time to sit in it.

I keep thinking about that. Not because his situation is unusual. Because it’s the norm. People spending years of their life earning things they don’t have the time, energy, or presence to enjoy. And by the time they notice, they’ve built an entire life around the earning and have no idea how to stop.

The Divergence Point

There’s a moment in everyone’s career where the earning and the enjoying split.

Early on, they move together. You get your first real paycheck and your life gets better in ways you can feel immediately. The apartment without roommates. The vacation you pay for without checking your account balance. Earning more and enjoying more are on the same track, moving in the same direction.

Then at some point, they diverge. You keep earning more but you stop enjoying more. The raise comes with more responsibility, which comes with more hours, which comes with less time for the things the raise was supposed to fund. The promotion looks great on paper and erases your evenings.

You cross the divergence point without noticing because the earning keeps going up. The paycheck increases, the title improves, the house gets bigger. The metrics that society uses to measure success keep climbing. So you assume the trajectory is right.

But the enjoyment flatlined somewhere behind you. You blew past it while chasing the next milestone. And the distance between what you’re earning and what you’re experiencing grows wider every year.

The Upgrade Trap

The mechanism that makes this so hard to escape is simple. Every time you earn more, you upgrade your life. And every upgrade creates new obligations that consume the time and energy you’d need to enjoy the upgrade.

The bigger house needs a bigger mortgage, which demands a bigger salary, which means a bigger role and longer hours. You bought the house so you’d have a beautiful place to spend time. The house is the reason you have no time to spend. The thing you earned and the capacity to enjoy it move in opposite directions. Each upgrade tightens the ratchet.

Psychologists call the underlying mechanism the hedonic treadmill. Humans adapt to improvements in their circumstances remarkably fast. The new house feels amazing for about three months. Then it’s just your house. The raise feels life-changing for about six weeks. Then it’s just your salary. Each thing you chased delivers a burst of satisfaction that fades faster than you expected and gets replaced by the next thing to chase.

The treadmill never stops because the adaptation never stops. And the only way to keep feeling the high of the upgrade is to keep upgrading, which keeps requiring more earning, which keeps consuming more time. You’re running faster to stay in the same emotional place. And you keep running because stepping off feels like falling behind.

“I’ll Enjoy It When...”

There’s a sentence that runs underneath all of this. You’ve probably said some version of it today.

“I’ll enjoy it when things slow down.” Or after this quarter. Or once this project wraps. Or when you hit a number that, if you’re honest, will be replaced by another number the moment you reach it.

The enjoyment is always conditional. Contingent on a milestone that keeps moving. I’ve done this for years. I told myself I’d take a real break once the podcast hit a certain number. Then I hit it and set a new target. The break never happened because the target was never the point. The point was having something to chase, because chasing is the only mode I knew how to operate in.

Bronnie Ware spent years as a palliative care nurse, working with people in the last weeks of their lives. She recorded their most common regrets. The second most common one, right after “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself,” was this: I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

Not earned more. Not bought the bigger house. Worked so hard. The people at the end of their lives weren’t looking back wishing they’d earned more. They were looking back wishing they’d been present for the life that was happening while they were earning.

The Presence Deficit

Even when we’re technically “enjoying” something, we’re often not there.

You’re on vacation but checking email between courses at dinner. You’re at your kid’s soccer game but mentally drafting a message to a client. The beautiful house you worked a decade to buy becomes the place where you scroll through your phone, not because anything is happening on it, but because being still feels wrong.

The problem isn’t just that you don’t have time to enjoy things. It’s that you’ve trained yourself out of the ability to enjoy them. The muscle for presence has atrophied. Being present requires you to stop thinking about what’s next, and if you’ve spent the last 10 years optimizing for what’s next, stopping feels like falling behind. The anxiety of not producing is so loud it drowns out the thing you’re supposed to be experiencing.

I felt this on a trip with Gina last year. We were somewhere beautiful. No work obligations. Nothing urgent. And I couldn’t stop reaching for my phone. Not because anything was happening on it. Because the silence made me uncomfortable. The absence of productivity made me anxious. I was sitting in a place I’d been looking forward to for months and I couldn’t be in it because my brain was still at my desk.

That was the moment I realized the problem wasn’t time. It was capacity. I’d spent so long in earning mode that I’d lost the ability to shift into anything else. The switch was rusted shut.

What You’re Actually Optimizing For

When you step back and look at how you spend your hours, not what you say matters but how you allocate your time, the picture gets uncomfortable.

The earning system has perfect feedback loops. You earn more and the number goes up. You get promoted and the title changes. Every step is measurable, visible, and socially validated. People congratulate you. Your parents relax. The scoreboard updates in real time.

Enjoying has no feedback loop. Nobody congratulates you for being present at dinner. There’s no promotion for taking a weekend off. No metric tracks how fully you experienced a Tuesday evening with someone you love. So enjoyment gets deprioritized, not because you decided it didn’t matter, but because it doesn’t have a scoreboard. And in a life full of scoreboards, the thing without one quietly disappears.

You end up optimizing for metrics that nobody on their deathbed has ever wished they’d improved.

The Recalibration

I’m not going to tell you to quit your job or sell your house or dramatically downshift your life. That’s not realistic and it’s not the point.

The point is noticing where you are on the treadmill and asking whether the next upgrade is going to make your life better or just more expensive.

The next time a bigger role, a bigger purchase, or a bigger commitment is on the table, run it through one question: what does this cost in time, and is that time currently spent on something I value? Because the cost of the upgrade isn’t just the price tag. It’s the hours. And the hours come from somewhere. Usually from the parts of your life that don’t have a scoreboard.

And if you’ve been telling yourself “I’ll enjoy it when...” for more than a year, stop and look at the pattern. You’ve said this before. You reached the milestone, didn’t enjoy it, and set a new one. The sentence is a loop, not a plan. Recognizing it as a loop is the first step to stepping off.

The Metric Nobody Tracks

The metric that matters most in your life is the one nobody measures.

Not your income or your net worth or your title. The metric is: how much of your life are you present for? Not watching it pass by while you think about work. Not enduring the week until the weekend arrives. Present for. Feeling the weight of an ordinary evening with someone you care about and knowing, in that moment, that this is the point of everything you’ve built.

The house doesn’t matter if you’re never in it. The income doesn’t matter if it funds a life you’re too busy to live.

You know this. Everyone knows this. It’s the most obvious insight in the world. And almost nobody lives according to it because the treadmill is loud and the present moment is quiet and we keep choosing the loud thing over the quiet thing until the quiet thing isn’t available anymore.

Bronnie Ware’s patients figured this out in their final weeks. They had absolute clarity about what mattered and zero time left to act on it.

You still have time. The question is whether you’ll use it to earn the next thing or to experience the things you’ve already earned.

The earning will always be there. The time to enjoy it won’t.

Thank you for reading,

Scott

My Links

• Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast)

• 10 Minute Mindset (Top Self Development Podcast)

• Newsletter (321k Subs)

• Social Media

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

Most people don’t need more advice. They need someone honest enough to show them what they’re actually doing. That’s a different thing entirely.

I had a mentor in my late twenties who gave me incredible advice. Strategic. Specific. The kind of advice you’d pay thousands for at a consulting firm. I left every conversation with a clear plan. Steps to follow. A direction that made sense.

I followed almost none of it.

Not because the advice was wrong. Because the advice was for a version of me that didn’t exist. He was telling me what a disciplined, focused operator should do next. I was a scattered, overcommitted guy who said yes to everything and couldn’t prioritize to save his life. His advice assumed a foundation I hadn’t built. And I kept nodding along, writing it down, and going home to the same patterns.

Then someone else entered my life. Not a mentor. Something different. A friend who’d known me long enough to see my patterns and was honest enough to describe them back to me. Not what I should do. What I was doing.

“You know you say yes to everything, right? Not sometimes. Everything. Someone asks you for something and you say yes before you’ve even thought about whether you have time. Then you’re underwater for two weeks and you wonder why you can’t focus.”

That wasn’t advice. That was a mirror. And it changed more about how I operate than three years of mentorship did. Because my problem was never a lack of knowing what to do. It was a lack of seeing what I was doing.

Subscribe now

Mentors Work on Your Story. Mirrors Work on Your Reality.

A mentor tells you what to do. A mirror shows you what you’re doing. These sound similar but they operate on completely different parts of the problem.

When you sit down with a mentor, you narrate your situation. And when you narrate, you edit. You frame the story in a way that makes your decisions seem reasonable. You emphasize the parts that support your self-image and minimize the parts that contradict it. You’re not lying. You’re doing what every human does when they talk about themselves: presenting the version that makes sense.

The mentor responds to the version you presented. Not to reality. Their advice might be perfect for the person you described. It just might not land for the person you actually are. Because the person you described and the person you are have a gap between them, and that gap is invisible to you. That’s the whole problem.

A mirror doesn’t let you narrate. A mirror has watched you operate. Seen the patterns in real time. Noticed the gap between what you say and what you do. When they reflect it back, they’re not responding to your story. They’re responding to what happened.

This is why mirrors change behavior and mentors often don’t. The mentor works on your narrative. The mirror works on your reality. And the distance between those two is where most of your problems have been living for years.

Why You Collect Mentors Instead

There’s a reason people collect mentors and avoid mirrors. Mentors are comfortable. Mirrors are not.

Read more

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

Your oldest friends and your family have a version of you in their heads that’s years out of date. And you keep performing it for them without realizing you’re doing it.

You walk into your parents’ house and something happens to you that you don’t notice right away.

Nobody says anything wrong. They’re happy to see you, they love you, everything is warm and fine. But within about 30 minutes, you’re not you anymore. You’re the version of you that lived in this house. The one who argued about curfews and rolled their eyes at the dinner table and whose opinions didn’t carry weight because you were the kid and they were the adults.

You’re 35 years old. You run a business and make decisions that affect other people’s livelihoods. You’ve changed in ways that would take hours to explain. None of that matters when you sit down at that table, because the people at that table aren’t sitting with who you are now. They’re sitting with who you were then. And something about being in that room makes you become that person again, without choosing to, without wanting to, like your growth has an off switch and walking through that front door flips it.

This isn’t just a family thing. It happens with old friends who still treat you like the person you were at 21. Childhood friends who reference the old you so often that the new you starts to feel like a costume you put on for work. Former coworkers who can’t see past the version they remember from five years ago.

The people who’ve known you longest have the most outdated version of you. And that version sticks with a grip that makes your actual growth feel invisible.

Subscribe now

The Frozen Version

Everyone who knows you carries a version of you in their head. It’s not you. It’s their mental model of you, built from the interactions they’ve had with you, frozen at whatever point they stopped updating.

Your parents’ version was frozen somewhere in your late teens or early twenties. It includes the mistakes you made at 19, the personality you had at 22, the limitations you had before you’d done anything meaningful in the world. They’ve watched you grow since then, but the mental model updates slowly, much more slowly than you change.

Your college friends’ version was frozen at graduation. The person who pulled all-nighters and made bad decisions and hadn’t figured anything out yet. That’s who they see when they look at you, not the person you’ve spent the last decade becoming.

This isn’t malicious. Nobody is deliberately holding you back. They just haven’t updated their file on you, because updating requires sustained attention and most people are too busy living their own lives to carefully track how you’ve changed. So they default to the version they remember. And that version is always older than the person standing in front of them.

Steve Jobs lived this in the most public way possible.

Read more

Read more

If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.

We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org

Most people read to confirm what they already believe and call it education. The people who are actually good at being wrong read the things that make them uncomfortable.

​Sponsored by LinkedIn Ads​: I get dozens of ads served to me every week. Most of them have nothing to do with me. Wrong industry, wrong stage, wrong everything. They’re burning budget on people who were never going to convert. That’s the problem with most ad platforms. You’re paying for eyeballs, not the right eyeballs.

LinkedIn Ads flips that. You can target by job title, company size, industry, seniority, skills, even specific companies on your prospect list. You’re not guessing who sees your ad. You’re choosing. And it works. LinkedIn Ads has the highest ROAS of any major ad network at 121%. That’s not a vanity metric. That’s real dollars back on every dollar spent.

If you’re running a startup and want to test it, LinkedIn is offering a $250 ad credit to get started. ​Learn more​ at ​LinkedIn.com/ScottClary​.

I used to think I was open-minded because I read a lot.

Fifty, sixty books a year. Business. Psychology. Biography. Philosophy. I had a Goodreads profile. I had a “currently reading” stack on my nightstand. I recommended books to people constantly. I was, by every visible measure, a reader. A learner. Someone who valued ideas.

Then I looked at what I was actually reading.

Business books that validated my strategy. Psychology that confirmed how I already thought about people. Biographies of founders who made the same decisions I would have made. Nothing that challenged the worldview I’d already built.

I wasn’t learning. I was decorating. Surrounding myself with books that made me feel smart about what I already believed. Collecting intellectual furniture that matched the room I’d already built.

Not a single book on my shelf in the last two years had made me uncomfortable. Not one had forced me to reconsider something I held deeply. Not one had made me put it down and think “wait, I might be completely wrong about this.”

I was reading sixty books a year and none of them were changing my mind about anything.

The Confirmation Library

Most people who read a lot are doing exactly what I was doing. They’re building a confirmation library. A collection of books that agrees with them.

The conservative reads conservative authors and the liberal reads liberal ones. Everyone is reading within their own worldview, finding evidence for what they already believe, and walking away feeling more certain than when they started.

This feels like learning. You’re absorbing new information. You’re highlighting passages. You’re thinking about ideas. All the mechanics of learning are happening.

But the direction is wrong. You’re moving deeper into what you already understand, not toward anything new. Reinforcing, not exploring. And reinforcement, no matter how sophisticated, doesn’t produce growth. It produces certainty. And certainty, as it turns out, is the opposite of wisdom.

The most well-read people I know are often the most entrenched. They’ve read so many books that agree with them that their positions feel unassailable. They don’t just believe what they believe. They believe it with footnotes. With citations. With a bibliography that proves them right.

That’s not education. That’s an expensive echo chamber.

What Actually Changes Your Mind

Now here’s the other pattern I’ve noticed. Among the 800+ people I’ve interviewed, the ones who are good at being wrong, who can update their thinking without treating it as failure, they read differently.

They don’t read to confirm. They read to challenge.

They deliberately seek out books that argue against what they believe. The investor reads critiques of capitalism. Not to be converted. To understand what the strongest argument against their position looks like. The optimist reads the pessimists, not because they enjoy it but because they want to pressure-test their own thinking against the best opposing case.

Charlie Munger called this “destroying your best-loved ideas.” He said the most important thing a thinker can do is actively seek out evidence that contradicts their favorite beliefs. Not the beliefs they hold loosely. The ones they hold most tightly. Because those are the ones most likely to be wrong in ways they can’t see.

Munger got this habit from reading across every discipline. Biology. Physics. History. Psychology. And what he found everywhere was the same story: the consensus was wrong, someone challenged it, the consensus eventually updated. The pattern repeated across every field throughout all of recorded history.

When you’ve read that story a hundred times, you stop trusting certainty. Including your own.

The History of Being Wrong

This is what reading teaches you when you’re doing it right. Not facts. Not frameworks. The history of being wrong.

Charles Darwin spent twenty years developing his understanding of how species change. He didn’t start with natural selection. He started with theories that turned out to be wrong. He revised. Found contradicting evidence. Revised again. Read an economics book by Thomas Malthus that had nothing to do with biology and suddenly saw the mechanism he’d been missing. Natural selection wasn’t a flash of genius. It was twenty years of being wrong in progressively more useful ways.

Einstein spent the last three decades of his life arguing against quantum mechanics. “God does not play dice,” he said. He was wrong. The theory he rejected became one of the most validated frameworks in the history of science. The greatest physicist who ever lived held an incorrect position for thirty years.

Every great book is a snapshot of someone’s best thinking at a specific moment. And if you read enough of them across enough time periods, you realize something humbling: the smartest people who ever lived were wrong about enormous things. Repeatedly. The history of human knowledge isn’t a straight line toward truth. It’s a long series of people getting it wrong, realizing they got it wrong, and getting it slightly less wrong the next time.

Once you’ve internalized that, your relationship with your own opinions changes. You stop gripping them so tightly. Not because you care less about being right. Because you’ve seen what “being right” looks like across a lifetime of serious thinking. And it looks a lot like being wrong first, then revising, then being wrong again in a more interesting way, then revising again.

The Opinion Half-Life

I’ve started thinking about opinions the way physicists think about radioactive decay. Every opinion has a half-life. A period after which there’s a decent chance it’s no longer accurate.

Some opinions have long half-lives. “Compound interest is powerful” and “relationships require effort” have been true for centuries. You can hold those with confidence.

Some have very short ones. The best marketing channel shifts every 18 months. How the economy works gets revised every decade. What technology will dominate changes every few years. Holding these with the same certainty as the long-lasting ones is a mistake most people make without realizing it.

Most people don’t sort. They treat every opinion with equal conviction. The view on nutrition they formed from one article five years ago gets the same confidence as a fundamental principle they’ve validated across decades of experience.

Readers who read to challenge learn to sort. They develop an intuition for which opinions are durable and which are temporary. They hold their views with different levels of grip depending on how much evidence supports them and how likely new evidence is to change the picture.

This isn’t being wishy-washy. It’s being accurate. The person holding every opinion at full strength is wrong about half of them and doesn’t know which half. The person holding opinions at varying levels of confidence is wrong less often, and updates faster when they are.

The Certainty Trap

The most dangerous people in any room are the ones who are certain. Not confident. Certain.

Confidence says “I’ve thought about this carefully and here’s what I think.” Confidence leaves room. It’s a position held with awareness that new information might change it.

Certainty says “this is how it is.” Certainty is closed. Challenging the opinion feels like an attack on the person because the opinion and the identity have fused. Being wrong isn’t just an intellectual update. It’s an existential threat.

I’ve seen this on the show hundreds of times. The most successful guests hold their opinions with confidence but not certainty. They’ll say “I believe X because of Y, but I could be wrong.” The ones who struggle most speak in absolutes. “This is the only way.” “Anyone who disagrees doesn’t understand.”

The difference isn’t intelligence. The certain person might be smarter. The difference is how much they’ve been exposed to the history of smart people being wrong. The confident person has read enough to know that certainty is usually a signal of how little you’ve explored, not how much.

Bertrand Russell put it plainly: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

He wasn’t praising doubt for its own sake. He was observing that wisdom and certainty rarely coexist. The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know. And the more you realize how much you don’t know, the harder certainty becomes.

The Two Bookshelves

I reorganized my reading after I realized I was building a confirmation library.

Now I think of reading as two bookshelves. The first shelf is books that go deeper on what you already know. Your field. Your expertise. The domain you work in. These books are useful. They make you better at what you do. They sharpen existing skills and existing knowledge.

The second shelf is books that challenge what you already believe. Books from outside your field. Books that argue positions you disagree with. Books written by people who think differently than you do. These books are uncomfortable. They don’t sharpen existing knowledge. They break it open.

Most people only have the first shelf. They read to confirm and improve. Go deeper on what they know. Get better at what they do.

The people who are good at being wrong have both shelves. And they spend at least as much time on the second one. Because the first shelf makes you more competent. The second shelf makes you wiser. And competence without wisdom is just being confidently wrong.

The test is simple: When was the last time a book changed your mind about something you believed? Not added to what you knew. Changed what you thought. Made you put it down and reconsider a position you’d held for years.

If you can’t remember, your second shelf is empty. And an empty second shelf means you’re not reading to learn. You’re reading to feel smart about what you already think.

How to Read for Being Wrong

Read one book this quarter that argues against something you believe. Not something you mildly disagree with. Something you feel strongly about. Find the strongest version of the opposing argument and read it cover to cover.

You’re not reading to be converted. You’re reading to understand the best case against your position. If your position survives contact with the best counterargument, it’s stronger than it was. If it doesn’t survive, you just upgraded your thinking. Either way, you win.

When you finish a book, ask yourself: Did this change how I think about anything? If the answer is no, you read a book from your first shelf. Useful, but not growth. Find something from the second shelf next.

Keep a list of things you’ve changed your mind about. Not things you know. Things you used to believe and no longer do. If the list is short, you’re not growing. You’re accumulating evidence for what you already think.

Notice when you feel defensive about an idea. That defensiveness is a signal. Not that you’re right. That the idea has fused with your identity. Ideas fused with identity stop getting updated because updating them feels like losing a piece of yourself. Those are the ideas that need challenging most.

What Reading Actually Gives You

Reading doesn’t make you right more often. It makes you wrong less painfully.

It shows you, over and over, across centuries and disciplines, that the smartest people who ever lived spent most of their time doing exactly what you’re doing right now: figuring it out. Getting it wrong. Revising.

But only if you let it. Only if you read the things that challenge you, not just the things that confirm you. Only if you treat your bookshelf as a tool for growth instead of a trophy case for what you already know.

The people I’ve met who are best at updating their thinking don’t have better opinions. They have more revised opinions. Opinions that have survived contact with contradicting evidence. That have been challenged, updated, and sometimes completely abandoned.

Those opinions are more reliable than the ones someone formed in their twenties and never touched again. Not because revision makes you right. Because revision makes you less wrong. And less wrong, compounded over years of honest reading, eventually looks a lot like wisdom.

The goal isn’t certainty. It’s a shorter distance between being wrong and being less wrong. Books are the fastest way to close that distance.

But only the ones that make you uncomfortable.

Thank you for reading,

Scott

My Links

• Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast)

• 10 Minute Mindset (Top Self Development Podcast)

• Newsletter (321k Subs)

• Social Media

If you love this content (please share it), but also…

Start here > ​https://newsletter.scottdclary.com​

Check out my ​Podcast​, connect with me on ​YouTube​ / ​Twitter​, and read my ​Weekly Newsletter​

Sponsor: Huel​

I skipped lunch three times last week. Not because I wanted to—back-to-back calls, no time, and my options were: waste 30 minutes prepping, grab drive-thru garbage, or just stay hungry. By 3pm I’m making terrible decisions because my blood sugar’s crashed and I can’t focus.

​Huel Black Edition fixes this.​ 35 grams of protein, 27 vitamins and minerals—it’s a complete meal, not a protein shake. Under $5, zero prep, and I’m not losing my afternoon to hunger brain.

New customers get 15% off with code SCOTTCLARY at ​huel.com/scott​. Minimum $75 purchase.

This Weeks Letter:

Success Story Podcast

I host a podcast which has 100 million+ downloads.

You should subscribe on ​Apple Podcasts​, ​Spotify​ or ​YouTube​.

Last Week’s Episodes

Tobi Pearce - Co-Founder of Sweat | The Founder Who Sold for $400M Says Most Business Advice Is Worthless

Tobi Pearce is an Australian entrepreneur and co-founder of Sweat, one of the world’s most downloaded fitness apps. He built it alongside Kayla Itsines starting in his early twenties, scaled it to tens of millions of users across 150+ countries, and sold to iFIT Health & Fitness in 2021 for roughly $400 million. Pearce did it with a lean, data-driven approach that leaned on community and digital distribution over traditional marketing. He’s known for dismissing conventional business advice as generic and context-free. Post-exit, he’s focused on investing, mentoring early-stage founders, and sharing unfiltered takes on what building and scaling actually looks like.

Kam Dasani - Strategic Investor & Trader | Why Everything You Were Taught About Money Is Keeping You Poor

Kam Dasani is a strategic investor, futures and options trader, and financial educator known online as @ProfitWithKam. A top 1% trader who leverages algorithmic trading strategies to build wealth and create financial freedom, Kam learned to trade at a high level with the guidance of a rocket scientist and former Goldman Sachs professional. Through his programs and social media content, he teaches everyday people how to escape the 9–5 grind by turning trading into a real, profitable skill. Beyond markets, Kam is also a mentor, content creator, and host of the Unsafe Space podcast, where he shares insights on money, mindset, and personal growth — showing his audience how to think like a professional trader and live life on their own terms.

See you next week,

Scott

My Links

• Success Story (Top 10 Entrepreneur Podcast)

• 10 Minute Mindset (Top Mindset Podcast)

• Newsletter (321k Subs)

• Social Media

Read more