Your Strength Can Become the Thing That Traps You Last week I met an old friend for coffee. And when I say old, I mean us, not him. We first met in 1992, when I returned to hapkido after taking time away during my electrical apprenticeship. Our birthdays fall in the same week, and about a decade ago—after years of only seeing each other intermittently following Grandmaster Han’s passing in 2007—we decided to make an annual birthday coffee a tradition. Nothing elaborate. We catch up and...
about 6 hours ago • 7 min read
The Three Questions That Changed My Life One of the habits that changed the direction of my life started, strangely enough, because of a decision I sometimes regretted making. When I started my electrical apprenticeship in the early 1988, I learned I’d also have school two nights a week. At the time, I was training hapkido five nights a week. And for whatever reason, I decided that if I couldn’t train five nights a week, there wasn’t much point in training at all. Looking back, that sounds...
1 day ago • 6 min read
The Building Didn’t Care How Busy You Looked There was a type of guy you could spot from a mile away on a big construction job once you knew what to look for. He was always sweating. Always out of breath. Always exasperated. And he always had a story. Holy shit, did he have a story. The Hero's Journey You’d ask how something was going and you were about to get the complete Hero’s Journey. First this happened. Then that happened. Then somebody screwed up the material. Then the lift wasn’t...
2 days ago • 8 min read
I Was Terrified to Hit Publish.Then I Did It Over 1,000 Times. One of the safest places you can hide in this world is inside self-improvement. That’s exactly why it’s so dangerous. You can read another book. Take another class. Watch another video. Do another drill. Rewrite the plan for the ninth time. Buy another piece of equipment you don’t strictly need. Get another certification to hang on the wall. And when somebody asks what you’re doing with yourself, you’ve got an answer that sounds...
3 days ago • 8 min read
You Don’t Have It… Oh Shit What happens when an old lesson shows up in new geometry I was rolling at open mat with Professor Joe, and he caught me the way I should have seen coming. Joe is one of my favorite people to roll with, because we don’t just grapple—we talk. He’s trained in BJJ, aikido, judo, and Muay Thai, and aikido was my first martial-art love, going all the way back to Hawaii, 1985 and ’86, before Hapkido and long before I ever touched jiu-jitsu. So when we get together, the...
4 days ago • 9 min read
Where Are You Sandbagging Yourself? In the locker room the other day, a brown belt and a black belt were giving me the usual ribbing about getting beat up on the mat. “You’re getting beaten up out there, Chuck.” “Semantics matter,” I said. “You’re not beating me up. I’m building resilience.” Everyone laughed. And I meant it, mostly. That’s been my lens forever—hardship builds capacity, adversity is useful, getting smashed is part of how you learn to stop getting smashed. It’s a true story....
5 days ago • 8 min read
Small Talk Is Big Talk How ordinary conversations become the doorway to trust, connection, and deeper relationships. This morning my café, Teddy's, was unusually busy. The parking lot was full of service trucks. There were a couple tables of elevator workers from shops I didn’t recognize — I caught the word “union,” but couldn’t tell you who they worked for. There were some glaziers I hadn’t seen before. And there was the familiar table I think of as the project-manager table, talking...
6 days ago • 6 min read
Don’t Quit Before You Adapt The first few uncomfortable repetitions may be telling you how unfamiliar something is—not how incapable you are. One of the most useful productivity ideas I’ve come across lately wasn’t an app, a morning routine, or a complicated system. It was earplugs. I saw a short video from Alex Hormozi talking about sleep. The idea, as I remember it: he and his wife Leila travel a lot, which means a different hotel every few days — busy streets, hallway noise, unfamiliar...
7 days ago • 8 min read
When the Bullied Becomes the Bully "As for me, all I know is that I know nothing." - Socrates How to recognize when the strength that once protected you has started hurting the people around you “The unexamined life is not worth living.” For years, I heard that quote from Socrates as an intellectual challenge. Think about your life. Question your assumptions. Know yourself. All useful. But I think there’s a much more practical reason to examine your life: The things you don’t examine have a...
9 days ago • 8 min read