I spent 12 years of my 18-year career as an AF Combat Arms Instructor. Invested over 10,000 hours of podium/range time, 1,200+ courses. Here are 5 concepts I learned that apply beyond the range.

If you keep breaking the same promise to yourself, stop fighting harder. The fight is the problem. The more importance you put on a goal, the more resistance you create around it. You white-knuckle the diet and the cravings get louder. You force the habit and the day finds a hundred ways to knock it over. That's not weakness. That's how pressure works. Push hard on anything and something pushes back. People who make it look easy aren't stronger. They just stopped treating it like a war. So lower the stakes. Drop the drama. Stop negotiating with yourself. Set the room so the right move is already the easy one, then let yourself drift into it. You don't have to fight the current. Pick a better river.

A few cool facts about my hometown MLB stadium. They found dinosaur bones digging Coors Field in 1993. The rumor was a 7-foot Triceratops skull. The reality fits in a box the size of a watch. That rib is why the Rockies mascot is Dinger.

Parado𝕏 The better my life gets irl, the less desire I have to be here. Happy Sunday 𝕏 troops.

Parent Life

12 years as an Air Force instructor taught me one important thing: When the student fails, check the instructor first. Same with your team. Same with anyone. If they don't get it, you haven't actually taught it yet.

When you want what you got, you finally get it.

Don’t do things you don’t want to do.

You’re not getting what you want because you’re placing too much importance around it. Counterintuitive, I know. Ignore this at the risk of continued misery.

I am truly reborn. I don’t know what was the turning point for this phase of life to “unlock” for me but I 100% believe my years of practice telling the truth holds most of the answer.

You have one job today. Protect your peace.

Got the dumb part down. Working on the tough part.

If you cannot make an argument without resorting to ad hominem attacks, you don’t have an argument. Calling someone a moron makes you more likely to be a moron than them.

Use your heart for as much as possible. The mind is only there for things like preventing you from getting eaten by alligators, etc. Listening to your mind alone will put you in pragmatic prison.

Worked ~15 hours today. Not a flex. Just gotta job it sometimes. Anyone else out there just doing what they gotta do this week? Or is everyone touching grass in an enchanted forest this weekend?

The cognitive limit on social attention has not been overcome by social media and its software. Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist, has argued for three decades that the human neocortex constrains the number of stable social relationships an individual can maintain to roughly 150. The figure is an average, not a rigid ceiling. Most people fall between 100 and 200. “Stable” here means more than name recognition. It implies knowledge of who a person is, how they relate to others in one’s network, and what genuine interactions with them are like. Beyond that threshold, relationships tend to thin into acquaintances, the superficial or even mere facial recognition. The constraint is approximate not absolute. Dunbar’s model describes concentric circles of roughly five intimate connections, ~15 close friends, fifty good friends, and 150 “meaningful” contacts. Outer rings extend to several hundred acquaintances and more than 1,000 people one can identify by sight. Each sub-layer requires less time and emotional investment — as chosen or naturally arrived upon. Limiting factors are cognitive capacity and available hours, not the number of names one can store in their contacts. Social media platforms haven’t found a way around these limits, though they have changed the complexion of the problem. Following accounts on X isn’t really equivalent to maintaining an actual relationship. You heart the term “parasocial relationship” tossed out there sometimes, but it’s closer to subscribing to a signal of sorts. One may follow thousands of accounts without “violating” Dunbar’s number in the classical sense, because most of those accounts never require reciprocal knowledge or sustained attention. Empirical studies going back to the twitter days convey interactions have found that the number of people with whom users meaningfully engage( measured by replies) still clusters between 100 and 200. Beyond that range, attention gets diluted. Platforms make it inexpensive to add follows, but they can’t expand the brain’s ability to track identities and context at scale. A following list of roughly 300 therefore occupies an interesting middle ground. It’s big enough to capture a useful range of voices and small enough that recognition and context remain feasible. At that scale, the feed’s more likely to remain discernible. Larger lists increase the volume of competing noise or signal, most of which the algorithm suppresses anyway. Practical distinction is not between “small” and “big” as moral categories, but between a list someone can still hold in mind and one that exists only as an unexamined accumulation. Dunbar’s number doesn’t prescribe an optimal following count. It indicates the cost of attention is real and that it’s paid in attention rather than abstract storage capacity. Software can reduce the friction of connection. It cannot, so far, raise the ceiling on the number of people whose place in one’s social world one can actually track. 300 isn’t a magic number. It seems to be where I naturally settle my following count. It’s simply the point at which my list remains something that can still be managed and paid attention to rather than a disjointed accumulation.

It is futile to try to grind to the top. Because you’re in competition with someone who doesn’t do it for the end reward or accolades. They love what you call the grind. They don’t see it as a grind. You cannot compete with someone who loves the game more than you do.

This gets at the problem nobody wants to face. What do we do when ai solves all of our problems? Many are not prepared to just “be”. Might want to start getting ready. *Fighting skills are a good hedge as well. Probably too late to get started on this front though.

“Allow yourself the luxury of deserving the best. If someone tries to persuade you that you must work for the good of someone or something else, do not believe them. If someone tries to prove to you that everything in life comes through hard work alone, do not believe them. If someone is imposing a harsh battle on you to secure your place in the sun, do not believe them. If they try to tell you what your place is, do not believe them. If someone tries to draw you into a religious sect or community because you can make an essential contribution to the common goal, do not believe them. If they tell you that you have to live your entire life in poverty because that is how you were born, do not believe them. If they tell you that you have limited options, do not believe them.” —Vadim Zeland

Had someone on X tell me to “Read Aristotle” in a dismissive tone the other day. Didn’t catch his handle but pretty sure this is the guy. Let me know if anyone recognizes him. Thanks.