You've probably heard of fields. Gravitational fields. Magnetic fields. Fields are invisible forces that fill space and tell stuff how to move. Like how a magnet pulls iron filings without touching them, or a star pulls a wandering meteor into its orbit. Fields enable action at a distance. They push and pull. They lie in wait until you come under their thrall.

The narrative field is like this, but instead of mass or quantum energy, it pertains to stories. The stories contain positive and negative charges, and these affect the positive and negative associations in the minds of people. Once those people are exposed to a story, the invisible forces of the narrative field shape their behavior.

Let's extend the analogy of the narrative field and see if it breaks down:

• Omnipresence - The field exists everywhere in social space, just as temperature exists everywhere in a room -- varying in strength across nodes on the social graph.

• Source charges - Stories, symbols, and memes serve as "charges" that generate the field

• Force carriers - Media, conversation, and social interactions transmit the field effects, much like air transmits sound; the ocean, waves; and spacetime, light.

• Field effects - Observable changes in beliefs, emotions, and behaviors when people enter the field. Narrative fields change behavior in social nodes (ie individuals) just as gravitational fields turn matter in its course.

Like gravity, the narrative field is inescapable. We are all embedded in it, and pulled by it. Some might say we seek it. The attraction goes both ways.

To push the analogy past its breaking point, narrative fields combine the properties of gravitational and electromagnetic fields. Similar to electromagnetism, you have both positive and negative charges. But similar to gravity where mass attracts mass, with narratives like attracts like. While a negative charge repels a negative charge electrically, in the narrative field they attract each other.

Like all fields, the narrative field sets bodies in motion. It prompts action. It does so by putting the positive and negative elements of story in relationship to each other, and to the charges the listener or reader carries within themselves.

A story is an excitation of the narrative field, just like a planet is to gravity. Stories gain power and momentum when there is the gap between what a person wanted (good) and what s/he got (bad). That gap repeats itself from scene to scene, as each attempt at remedy produces some new unexpected. Very often a villain (bad) causes a rift between want and have. And a hero (good) remedies it. Sometimes you have a dichotomy pitting a villain against a hero. Sometimes you have a triad where the villain does bad things to a victim and the hero intervenes.

The victim-villain-hero triad creates a narrative field that tries to align you with the hero and victim against the villain. It gives you a chance to play one of those parts, and most people play victims or heroes by following the gradient of the narrative field. This triad is most effective in politics, where leaders rally voting tribes by building outgroups (villain) and ingroups (heroes, victims).

There are lots of stories. One is a meta-story called the hero's journey:

The hero's journey can overlay the victim-villain-hero triad, and it goes roughly like this: Normal person is forced to leave their small and comfortable life. Maybe bad things are happening to good people because of bad people. Normal person sets off to do something hard to remedy the difference between is and ought. Normal person is transformed by this process into someone wiser and stronger who sees the world in a new light. A boy becomes a warrior; a scrooge becomes a benefactor; a Saul becomes Paul.

The hero's journey is an illustration of the narrative field insofar as it shows how a paradigm shift changes behavior. Hard suffering and a long journey lead to a change of view, a change of life. The hero learns to tell a new story to themself, even as they participate in a bigger story that we consume. The drama is in the transformation of the hero via the change in their narrative perception of their world. While many narratives do their work on us without requiring quite as much, they are particularly effective when we have left our comfortable life behind.

(For still other story types, here’s a list of some basic plot lines from the BBC and Kurt Vonnegut.)

That is why COVID was such a powerful moment. Because so many cities, schools and workplaces were shut down; because so many small and comfortable lives were disrupted, an extraordinary number of people were forced to embark on a journey. They acquired a new charge, and that charge related strongly to other charges in the changing narrative field. Democrats became Republican, agnostics were born again, libertarians longed for totalitarian measures.

When politicians opine that you should "never let a good crisis go to waste", they are recognizing that narrative fields grow stronger when people are set in motion, when a gap opens between what they expected and what they got. Dislocating change forces them to embark on a kind of hero's journey. "Do your own research" is the hero's journey online. Conspiracy theories are the way grownups re-enchant the world, because they are given a story to live that attaches powerful narrative charges to people they think are real.

If you have ever studied the wave forms that make up a field, you know about constructive and destructive interference. When two waves align at peak and trough, a larger wave emerges with greater force. And when they are out of phase, where the peak of one overlaps with the trough of another, they cancel each other out. Narrative fields are like that. Story A can either amplify (constructive) or neutralize (destructive) story B.

An example from 2025: When Jake Tapper launched his book showing that the Biden clan had concealed a sitting president's deepening infirmity, that was one story. It cast Biden and clan as villains. When the news emerged immediately after that Biden had stage 4 prostate cancer that would soon kill him, Biden became the victim and the previous story was neutralized. Our pity submerged our anger; impending death eclipsed the lie. One story ran destructive interference on the other.

Lots of people want to tell stories, and all of us are submersed in them. So what are the elements that bend the narrative field to make a story powerful?

While there is a large subjective element that determines a given story's power, powerful stories have some common elements.

• How bad is the bad thing that is happening?

• How good is the victim that the bad thing is happening to?

• How alienating and unsympathetic is the villain responsible for the bad thing?

• How easy is it for us to see that this bad thing could be stopped; ie to step in as hero?

• How promising is the promised land the hero takes us to?

• And above all, how much does this story agree with the others already inside of us and inside those we look to for social validation?

Because stories are social and collective affairs. It's one thing for a single fan at a baseball game to stand up; it's another for the entire crowd to move the human wave around the stadium. Big stories move like those waves. A few people can trigger them, but everyone feels their power, whether we stand up or not.

Pay As You Grow

You've heard of "pay as you go." It's usage pricing. The more you use something, the more you pay for it. Your electricity bill is "pay as you go."

And that model seems fair, because it aligns cost with value, but it doesn't always work in software sales. The reason is that businesses want predictable costs. The only way you're going to get them to sign on for highly variable costs is to make the thing you sell incredibly cheap. That is, micro-pricing, or more like pico-pricing, is a way to convince people that they don't need predictability, since after all, fractions of a penny won't kill the company.

But there's a related business model I think of as "pay as you grow."
With pay as you grow, you might offer a free or super-low-cost startup tier. It's not usage that will make a startup meaningful to the vendor, but the very success and growth of that startup long term.

This is a much deeper incentive alignment, and it establishes one of the most valuable feedback loops between vendors and the customers they support. When you win, they win.

Lots of vendors with these dynamics end up being close to the money, or at least close to the traction. Two examples that come to mind are Stripe and Posthog. These are my poster children for "pay as you grow" companies, and their behavior in the ecosystem—the lengths they go to in order to help their customers succeed—tells me that their incentives are deeply aligned.

There's nothing in the world more valuable than a well-structured feedback loop. That is, a system that sends you valuable signals when you do things that benefit yourself and others. "Pay as you grow" epitomizes that.

This also incentivizes great companies to treat small customers like they matter, to get in early, support the upstarts, and make bets on the long tail of possible futures before others can see what's coming.

The Mood is the Message

Did you ever wonder why the blues was called the blues? I mean, it's actually some of the most vibrant, energetic, over-the-top, dance-on-the-tables music out there. Blues musicians have *fun*. Blues listeners have *fun*. (Think B.B. King or Lonnie Brooks.)

Even if the lyrics of a blues song are sad as hell, the vibe is not. The mood is a deep exuberance for life, a "damn I'm glad to be here" explosion.

If you just read the lyrics of popular blues songs, you'd come away with a wrong understanding of the blues. You'd think it was just moaning and groaning (and sure, there are really sad blues songs, but that's not what keeps the concerts hopping).

This is an example what I call "the mood is the message."

It's also true in a lot of children's books. No matter what they say they're about -- dinosaurs, garbage trucks, or grumpy monkeys -- the underlying message of the drawings and the plot is "Life's OK. Small bad things happen, usually misunderstandings, and then they get fixed."

The mood is the message.

This is important in startupland, too. Whether you are an investor or a founder or a service provider in tech, you're out there at conferences and panels and mixers and it's show time.

I've noticed some founders will start into their pitch and, while the substance is solid, the tone is low-key, almost abstracted from what they're actually doing. Lots of deeptech founders come from academia. Lots of govtech founders come out of bureaucracy. Enterprise software founders do too!

And most of them have been taught to put a damper on themselves, be cautious, wrap up what they're saying in excess verbiage and caveats. Make it analytic. All of that is non-threatening in environments where boats should not be rocked.

But in tech, you need to rock people. And industries. That's the whole point.

And once you have a great idea, a demo, a few dozen customer conversations under your belt, one of the most important things you can do is tell the story.

The story should be factual and true, of course. You should be able to back it all up.

But above all, the story should be exciting. The way you tell it should convey the drive you have, the momentum you feel, the promise and the vision. You have to amp yourself up. Dig into the emotions of your prospects who are struggling. The industry that's on a tipping point. Your own commitment.

And that should come through not in baked phrases like "we're superpumped", but in every innocent article of speech that you use to drive the explanation of why and how you're building what you're building.

So how do you do that? I start with the body. I used to do jumping jacks before sales calls, and deep breathing exercises before I got on stage. High-energy and calm is what I was aiming for.

People remember how you make them feel, like an iron filing remembers a magnet. They're in the thrall of an invisible field, the narrative and emotional forces you emit.

Because the mood is the message.

I Finally Understood Gamification

One of the upsides of being a startup investor is that you get to learn from founders and feed your own curiosity. (In a way, it resembles how journalists with a wide beat learn from their sources.) Today I learned a new way of thinking about "gamification" thanks to Melinda Jacobs.

Usually when I hear gamification, I think of someone tacking cheap, random incentives onto something users aren't motivated to do. It's trite and thin.

But today I understood it from a different angle, as a sincere approach to UX that paves the way for people to get what they really want in life.

When Melinda talks about gamification, she talks about giving people "a clear next move." Gamification helps turn their own "messy ambitions into small, doable actions." I love that. It lines up with two other writers who have helped me understand motivation and ability: B.J. Fogg and Andrew Huberman.

B.J.'s book is called Tiny Habits. He shows people how to create new behaviors out of nothing: just a desire to make their lives better and a single hook in the day to hang a habit on. Highly recommended!

Andrew talks about "Duration, Path, Outcome." These are the aspects of any situation or problem to solve that the brain must grapple with before it moves you to act. If you can get clarity on what to do, how much effort it will take, and what it gets you, then you've pulled yourself out of confusion, which is a behavior killer.

If, as B.J. shows, you can make the step small, the reminder easy, and the reward clear, then you might have just enough juice to get yourself over the action threshold. And all that can be in the service of life-changing behaviors, like putting yourself on the road to better health, emotional calm, or meaningful connection with loved ones.

Duration, path, outcome—getting a clear next move for yourself—is crucial because most of the time, we think of our problems and goals in lofty abstractions, grandiose ideals that are useful as part of an internal narrative but useless when it comes to pragmatic planning.

If gamification is giving people a clear next move to achieve their goals, I'll take it!

GTM Thoughts

Last night I met an expert in GTM and sales, Brandon F. Goldman. He's 10x'd startup revenues to mid-eight figures. He's seen companies to IPO. Now he's an operations partner for ventures firms in the Bay.

He said two things that struck me:

- "If you can't buy a contact list based on how you describe your ideal customer, you don't have a business."

- "Lazy CEOs say they only hire A+ players. I hire the right person for the right job." This applied especially to sales people, because different folks will be a better or worse fit for different products and industries. And even if they beat their quota by 270% last year, the real question is: were they just taking orders from customers because the product was so good, or did they have to fight for it?

"The Venture Track"

There's an idea that's not widely known outside of venture, which startup founders should be aware of. It's called "the venture track." Being on the venture track roughly means that you and your company are investable, and being off the track means that you'll have a hard time raising.

Being on the venture track is not a single end state -- it's dynamic over time, and changes with fund-raising stage, markets and technology waves. Even though the concept is squishy, there's something important to be learned from it, if only to understand how you'll be perceived.

Two smart technical graduates from a respected school who have built things together and have a prototype of a decent software product are on the venture track. That doesn't mean every firm will invest in them, but it means they'll get a hearing. Statistically, they have a good chance.

A firm with a decade providing services, whose founders realize that some of their work can be productized and who decide to build the product and seek funding is probably "off the venture track," and will need to do some work to make the leap (eg a spinout, a prototype with early customers). Early-stage funding tends to go to new ideas, and companies that are just getting off the ground.

Likewise, a startup that received early-stage funding, and whose growth plateaued, can fall off the venture track. They're just not posting the month on month increases any more. In the earliest rounds, you can raise on promises, but later you raise on proof, and the best proof is revenue (for software), and working prototypes for certain kinds of hard deeptech (space, energy).

The purpose of this post isn't to discourage founders who are off the beaten path. It's to calibrate mental models on what investor perception will be, so that the company with an unusual story can make the necessary adjustments to be venture ready. The question to ask yourself as a founder thinking about raising is: Am I on the venture track wrt my stage? If not, how do I get there? Do my proof points match my perceived maturity as a company?

Homeostasis vs Allostasis

We all learned the term homeostasis in high school biology. When your body adjusts itself to maintain a constant temperature (by sweating to cool down, for example), that's homeostasis. The state that is the same is 98.6 degrees F (37 C). The thermostat in your house supports homeostasis. You set it at 68 degrees and then it heats and cools the rooms to keep the temperature close to the fixed point.

But there's another idea that's more important and less well known: allostasis. Just like homeo+stasis means "same state", allo+stasis means "different state". An allostatic system adapts when it antipicates change. When your going into a stressful situation, your body might pump adrenaline to get you ready for the stress. So allostasis goes beyond control systems into prediction. It gets you ready for something. As opposed to a normal thermostat, an allostatic system is like a smart device. (Real-world example: a smart insulin pump that learns the peaks and troughs of your blood sugar and doesn't wait until you're in crisis.)

For me, the idea of allostasis is important because knowledge workers have a rhythm of attention and mental energy. It fluctuates throughout the day. If you can do the hardest work in what you know to be your peak hours, and then take a 15 minute break before your energy is fried, then you're adapting to a rhythm you can predict (so that you can come back for another attention bout). You're managing yourself as an allostatic system.

"Quiet yourself so that you can listen"

Yesterday I was talking with someone who works in a healing profession.

She said the most important thing she had learned was how to "quiet myself so that I could listen to another person's body."

That phrase struck me as wise.

If I were to rephrase it for a founder, I'd say: "Quiet yourself so that you can listen to another person's struggle."

Startup founders engage in a cycle of conjecture and criticism. That is, they have ideas and they test them against the world. The second part of the cycle involves listening, and listening hard.

One of the biggest obstacles people have to listening well is their own internally generated noise. The thing they want to be true. Their big vision. This leads to all kinds of wishful thinking when users don't buy, and all kinds of dismissive reactions when they're told that what they've built is not what's needed.

Listening hard is a superpower that is both underrated and under-discussed. It's not as heroic as building, but it's equally necessary, and usually comes first in the iterated cycle. That is, how do you know what to build if you didn't somehow encounter a problem?

An important part of listening is hearing both what's said and what's not said.
In venture, many investors will tell you no, but they won't tell you why. They may even give you polite reasons for their rejection which are not the real reasons; e.g. they don't think you are a good fit for the problem you're solving, or maybe that you've chosen a co-founder who doesn't make sense.

In screenwriting, writers are given notes to modify their script. But the best ones listen for "the note behind the note", meaning the reasons or intent which suggest that your creative direction has diverged from, say, the producer, the director or the star. What do they really want but can't express? Get ahead of the puck and build that.

There are a lot of reasons why criticism is not always explicit and direct:

- People are conflict averse, and know from past experience that criticism just leads to fruitless debate

- People don't have time to invest all the context necessary in a collaborator; they need someone who "just gets it". They prefer the ease of low-information delegation. Telling people exactly what they should be doing just gives them a chance to hack the test, when what most gatekeepers really want is someone who operates by principles that will lead them to perform without hand-holding.

- People don't exactly know what they want -- they are bad predictors of their own future behavior -- they just know that what you gave them is not it.

The best way I can describe this kind of listening is to call it outward-focused. You're no longer selling someone hard on what you've built. You are trying to build the clearest and most empathetic mental model of their lives, goals, workflows, needs and struggles.

That becomes the north star that gives direction to what you build.

Anti-Network Effects

Everyone's heard of network effects. They are one of tech's most important flywheels. The more users join a network, the more valuable it becomes. This is true of social networks, email, telephone systems, and before that the telegraph. It's true of ride-hailing companies like Uber, service marketplaces like Thumbtack, payment systems like PayPal, and video conferencing platforms like Zoom. One person with a phone has a worthless device; a million people with phones each have a world at their fingertips.

So what happens with anti-network effects? Instead of the positive feedback loop of a network effect, you get a negative feedback loop. That is, with each additional user, the network is a little less valuable. Tools purporting to give stock trading tips are like this. The more people who have access to them, the less any given user obtains an edge. That's why Bloomberg charges so much for its terminals. The company implemented an effective chat network in 1990, but their ideal network size is pretty small.

This is true of many marketplaces that suffer from imbalance or bad actors:

- Dating apps (more men than women, misaligned goals)
- Service or labor marketplaces (when supply vastly outstrips demand, every new entrant makes the other vendors struggle more to be seen)
- Traffic apps and congestion: when Waze sends too many people down the same alternative route, Waze users have lost their edge. This applies to any app where users are routed through a shared resource with limited bandwidth.

Imagine a restaurant you used to like that was discovered by tourists. "Nobody goes there anymore -- it's too crowded." That's an anti-network effect.

Other expressions of anti-network effect are:

- Gresham's Law: "The bad money drives out the good." Which happens to be true of group chats as much as currency.
- Eternal September: That moment in Autumn 1993 when AOL started giving its users access to Usenet, flooding what was a cozy club of computer nerds with an endless stream of new users who didn't know the rules.

This is important because if you're a founder building a network, you need to know how to manage anti-network effects. They are not mutually exclusive with network effects. You can see both happening at the same time; i.e., "Yay I can chat with my friends, and boo I'm a target of spam."

As the Bloomberg example shows, you can build a massive business managing network effects and figuring out where to draw the line with your pricing. Every totally open club ends up imploding under the weight of strangers and the repercussions of distrust and confusion. The trick is to know where to draw the line.

Cheap, Crude, Fast

Startup founders are economic researchers, and as such, their job is to generate and test ideas based on what they learn and observe. They follow a roughly scientific process of conjecture and criticism, where the real-world provides its critique of their hypotheses by showing a willingness to use and pay for a product, or not... This describes how a startup makes progress pre-product-market fit (PMF). The key metric is how many tests you can run before you're out of money.

How do you optimize for that? Cheap, crude, fast. You need to lower how much time and money each test takes. The way to do that is by testing crude ideas. Sophistication and complexity are your enemy, because they require more money and time to implement. So are perfection and polish.

Among smart people, including many engineers, there is a bias toward complexity and premature optimization. They want to make something impressive before they know if it's needed. They want to dream big, build something interesting, anticipate failure modes. The status gradient pushes them toward complexity and intellectual flourishes.

But that is not the way. People with hair-on-fire problems will buy imperfect products and use them in anger.

It takes real discipline to optimize for the right thing while seeking PMF. Choose the wrong metric and your company dies. The right metric is speed of learning, you learn by fast tests, and you run fast tests by building the crude thing and getting it in front of the right people. Again and again.

Return on Advice

As a VC, I end up offering a lot of advice. That sounds smug, so let me just say that it's often unsolicited and sometimes wrong!

In that act of advice giving, I think I'm rare. Most investors I know hardly ever give advice. If they do, it usually takes the indirect form of a question -- eg "how are you thinking about distribution partnerships?" -- and it doubles as due diligence.

That is, many VCs see founders making mistakes in, say, fund-raising, and they simply move on to the next company. Because the missteps are a sign the founders will fail in other ways.

Many of those investors probably started out as eager-beaver advice offerers like me, and ended up letting founders learn from their own actions.

I finally know why. It's an idea I call "return on advice."

Let's be charitable and assume everybody wants to make a difference, to help the world be a better place. That is, they care about the impact of their actions. With advice, the impact is whether or not the advisee altered their behavior because of what you said.

So "return on advice" can be gauged roughly by whether a founder took action and tried your idea; with luck, it solved their problem, and if it didn't solve anything, then at least they learned something about the situation (and by extension, so did you).

There are two failure modes in the advice economy.

1) The advisee ignores what you say. When the next conversation rolls around, they still have the same problem. This alone is a bad sign. In startups, progress means getting past one set of problems so you can arrive at the next. If your problems (and your insights about those problems) are not evolving, you're doing something wrong.

2) Maybe their lack of action means you're giving them bad advice -- also a good reason to stop!

3) You are now the go-to source for help. This is bad because you don't have time, but your do-gooder approach has prompted a form of dependence. It's like Munchhausen's for startups. As a VC, you should become less and less necessary over time as the companies you support grow beyond what you know.

So in the first case, in return for advice, you get nothing. In the second, the founder gets less than nothing. In the third, you get less than nothing. If you assume that the effort/reward ratio rules everything, then this is a situation where zero advice is the best path. And thus, the deafening silence founders sometimes hear on the other end of the call.

The ideal case is one where a small amount of advice confers a lot of leverage. As Alan Kay said: "A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points."

The right advice can unlock a first-time founder's ambition, or show a new approach to a problem. Often, those founders have just enough skill or persistence to unpack whatever experience got bottled in advice, and translate it to their unique situation. That is, they start with a baseline of skill and energy high enough to run with what's offered.

Finding Co-Founders

I met with a really promising young founder last week. He had a clear vision for his product and the technical skills to build it. But he had heard that he should find a co-founder, and didn't know where to look.

I told him he should start building, and then talk about it with the smartest, hardest-working people he'd ever met. He's lucky, because he was a math Olympian who went on to study with a lot of amazing people in college.

The best founding teams I've seen come out of long-standing relationships. If you're in your early 20s, that probably means people you met in college or earlier. If you're mid-career, hopefully it includes people you've built things with along the way. If you think someday you'll found a company, take notes in school and at your day job. Notice who's honest, hard-working, a great communicator, a problem solver. Those are the people you should call to share your excitement when you're building something new.

The better your idea, the deeper your commitment, and the more you can prove you have all those same traits, the more likely it is you'll find people you'll want to build a great company with.

The longer you spend in communities of builders, the better your chances of finding the right co-founder. If you think about it, you probably already know them.

I just read Jeremy Kun's great piece about math and storytelling. In it, he talks about ways he found to engage kids in math and other learning by telling stories, mostly adventure stories. It turns out that math is learned best as a story, at least when you're very young.

I have found something similar to be true when it comes to building.

Some years ago, Stripe co-founder John Collison tweeted an epiphany: "The world is a museum of passion projects."

I think there’s another way to say it, more general if not more eloquent. Everything built embodies a story, and it's not just the story of the people who conceived it.

Each building and object is a story in itself, in how its internal parts relate to each other, and how they touch the rest of the world; e.g. the humans who use a building.

This really hit me while I was watching my 6 year old son play with Legos. He loves stories, loves being read to, and when he builds with Legos, he places each new brick into a building or vehicle with an explanation of what it contributes and how it will be useful to the figurines who inhabit them.

The bricks are stuck together with explanations as much as they are by the friction and the interlock of their studs. That is, the subcomponents of an object relate to each other much as the elements of story do. Wall and roof and window and door, each with its purpose, constraints and repercussions on the surround.

In a conversation later, a friend who is smart about user interfaces made me see that this is what design is. He showed me that the objects' stories change after the object is built, as the human users bring new needs and expectations and explanations to objects. Just like readers rewrite any book that writers give them.

Every thing finds its identity in the way it relates to its larger environment. Each object is its Gestalt, and the Gestalt changes over time.

Sidenote: Some of the smartest people I know have a trick they do with narrative.

I used to work with a team of great AI engineers. Anytime I had a question about how an algorithm worked, I'd go to one of them to ask for an explanation. And he'd become the algorithm. He would shrink himself to a microscopic conceptual level, and imagine himself walking through the decision points to explain how the world looked to the algorithm from a first-person point of view. He'd identify with the algorithm, which is a big part of story. I also think this can be done to cross in gap in scale; for example, also macroscopically, to tell the story of the universe.

Now I want to make an even bigger claim, and begin by noting that many stories tell us how to overcome a problem; man vs nature, etc. Such a function surely served an evolutionary purpose: The better we told stories of problems solved, the more likely we were to survive. Somehow this function of overcoming and problem solving is embedded in language itself.

Language sees the world as a problem to be solved. In his book “Seeing Like a State”, James Scott showed that states try to make society legible in order to control and administer them, sometimes adopting standardized perspectives that obscured social complexities. They engaged in a form of data compression that led to interpretive distortion. And I guess my intuition is that language is like that. It makes life legible by being particularly good at expressing conflict and overcoming.

Which is why we remember stories so well, why they help us make sense of the world we build. They encode the world in a way that just might help us stay alive.

Some time between my late teens and early twenties, I became depressed. The clinical, long-term variety of depression that keeps a person from doing things they ought to do, like turn in college essays. So I took a few years off school, and after a period of odd jobs and wandering, I landed at a Zen center in California. That was where I learned to breath. Which is a funny thing to say, considering that I had been doing it my whole life.

Breathing is weird. It happens all by itself, but you can also control it. It’s where the involuntary and voluntary sides of your nervous system meet. Given that breath plays a big part in how you oxygenate your body and mind, which affects how calm or excited you feel, and given that you can control it, you have a powerful lever to change your state.

In physics, there's this concept known as a "state change" - when water transitions from liquid to gas while boiling, or from liquid to solid while freezing. Starting in the 1970s, self-help movements adopted the term “state” to describe something different but equally important: the combination of thoughts, feelings, and physiology we experience at any given moment.

Psychological and physiological state changes are powerful tools for emotional self-regulation and stress management, both of which enable us to tackle difficult tasks. When someone says exercise makes them "feel better," they're describing a state change. The same goes for a brisk walk, deep breathing, an ice bath, a sauna session, or a short nap.

In the Zen center, I learned how breath could dial me up or dial me down. Breathing in more than you breathe out is a good way to get excited; and the reverse is also true. If you’re curious, you can try out different breathing patterns here and gauge their effect. The breath has the additional role of focusing one’s attention, like one of those laser pens that cats chase. This is why Buddhists use it to meditate.

And that was my gateway to state changes, or methods that help bring energy and focus to work, studies, health, family, you name it; i.e. they maximize what you can make or do, and how deeply you connect.

You can crystallize this in a simple equation:

Impact = Energy x Focus x Time x Purpose

This relationship is multiplicative rather than additive - if any factor drops to zero, the others become irrelevant. They work together as a system. Zen might substitute Presence for Impact. Which, fine.

The human ability to influence one’s state is a form of liberation, and you face no gatekeeper. We can consciously activate physiological levers to transform our thinking and feeling in moments. Why? Because the old dualism of mind and body is bunk. Every part of your nervous system is a component of your body, and if you get your heath right, you’re a long way to getting your brain right.

While much snake oil has been sold promising personal transformation, I'll focus on evidence-based approaches that have worked for me: sleep, breath, movement, and nutrition, as well as intermittent energy renewal and digital hygiene. These simple interventions can create profound long-term changes in my life at work and at home.

While this advice is often funneled into executive coaching, it deserves broader application. Teams and organizations that master energy and attention management reach their goals earlier and make better strategic choices (i.e. they choose better goals). Front-line workers and individual contributors who interface directly with customers and operations can make enormous contributions through both their work quality and their ability to provide feedback about on-the-ground realities to leadership, which is all too often insulated from the ultimate consequences of high-level decisions.

Two crucial resources underpin consistent, high-quality work and presence:

1. Mental Energy: Think of your brain like the body of an athlete - it strengthens with exertion, but it needs to recover. It is an energy tank that needs nightly refilling as well as regular renewal throughout the day. It recovers through proper sleep, exercise, nutrition, hydration, and strategic breaks. Intermittent energy renewal. Basically, during the day you want to move between the quadrant on the upper right and the quadrant on the lower right, spicing it now and then with a little stress. If you can do this, you avoid the quadrant on the lower left, where bad things happen.

2. Working Memory: This is your brain's workspace for managing the 3-7 pieces of information we can remember simultaneously. It's where complex thinking happens, but it's easily disrupted (and filled up) by interruptions and unfinished tasks. Digital hygiene - limiting notifications and addictive websites - plays a crucial role in preserving it. The more interruptions you are subject to, the more of your working memory is consumed by tasks you have set aside, limiting the space available for the new task at hand.

The most effective state change method I can recommend is intermittent energy renewal, or deliberate rest. When starting focused work:

• Set a timer for 60-90 minutes (following what’s called an ultradian cycle, which is a cycle that happens more than once a day)

• Take the planned break before reaching exhaustion

• During breaks, choose simple, engaging rote activities (walking, juggling, breathing exercises, simple games like Two Dot)

• Avoid mentally taxing or emotionally intense activities during these renewal periods (no doom-scrolling!)

To protect working memory during focus bouts:

• Limit interruptions and distractions

• Minimize unfinished tasks or "open loops"

• Disengage from social media and non-essential messaging

• Focus only on information necessary for your current work

My main point is the mental energy and focus are really the results of a bank shot. You’re not going to just squeeze more out of yourself with energy drinks and caffeine. You have to rest, reset, intermittently renew your energy, and energize the body in which your brain resides. If you are a founder: investing in your health is investing in your company. These are not separate things. More broadly, investing in your health is investing in your work, as well as your relationships.

These practices contrast with what you might call linear work. Just pushing through, hour after hour, that thing colleagues and bosses sometimes praise or brag about in a boiler room. It’s a young man’s game. By the time you’re 30, your capacity to exert energy and absorb stress starts declining on a physical level, and is only sustained through constant and deliberate maintenance. It’s not about *lots* of rest, but a higher frequency of short breaks, and underlying habits to sustain health.

These recovery periods are an interval method for the brain, similar to what athletes develop to increase the strength of their muscles, by stressing them with reps, and then letting them rest.

Through these practices, you can harness state changes to maximize both your professional impact and personal presence. While there's nothing magical here, the cumulative effect of these small adjustments is transformative over time.

Further Reading/Viewing

A recent Webinar I gave.