Curiosity Chronicle

In 1902, a 19-year-old cadet in an Austrian military academy was silently becoming a bystander in his own life.

Franz Xaver Kappus felt trapped. On the track for a life as a military officer, but unsure if he wanted it in the first place. His heart felt pulled in a very different direction.

To poetry.

When Kappus learned that one of his teachers had taught the famed poet Rainer Maria Rilke when he was a young man attending the same academy, he decided to act. Kappus sent a set of his poems to Rilke, asking for an honest assessment and guidance on his life ahead...

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This episode brought to you by:
DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. 
Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial Advisor. Track your spending, investments, and net worth—all in one place.
Innerbody Labs - A Higher Standard. After reviewing thousands of health products, we built formulas we wished existed.
Lemon - The Al agent that turns your voice instructions into finished tasks.

My son turns four years old this week.

And if I'm being honest, I don't know where the time went.

Everyone says this, and I spent most of my life rolling my eyes at it, but my goodness, it goes by fast. With parenting, perhaps more so than most things in life, the days are very long but the years are painfully short.

Last year, I started a practice of writing him a letter each year on his birthday.

He can't read them (yet), but my hope is that they serve as something of a compass for his journey. Whether I'm here or gone, I hope that they guide him in the direction of a fulfilling life.

I know I can't walk the path for him, but maybe I can shine a bit of light to give him confidence along the way.

Here is my open letter to my son on his 4th birthday...

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This episode brought to you by:
DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. 
Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial Advisor. Track your spending, investments, and net worth—all in one place.
Innerbody Labs - A Higher Standard. After reviewing thousands of health products, we built formulas we wished existed.
Lemon - The Al agent that turns your voice instructions into finished tasks.

Last weekend, I had the joy of catching up for a quiet dinner in Omaha with a mentor and friend, Apple CEO Tim Cook.

He recently announced that he would be transitioning out of the CEO role at the company after a 15 year tenure.

When the news first broke of his announcement, several people asked me how I thought he would handle the major life change and identity shift.

My answer was a story from a dinner we shared several years ago—one specific interaction that I'll never forget...

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This episode brought to you by:
DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. 
Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial Advisor. Track your spending, investments, and net worth—all in one place.
Innerbody Labs - A Higher Standard. After reviewing thousands of health products, we built formulas we wished existed.
Lemon - The Al agent that turns your voice instructions into finished tasks.

Over the weekend, I made what has become an annual pilgrimage to Omaha, Nebraska to attend the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting.

The event, which is nominally a business update on Warren Buffett's famed holding company, has become a staple in my annual calendar, mostly due to the incredible density of deep thinkers who drop into the midwestern city for a short window of time.

Every year, I seem to find myself in a few rooms that set off my imposter syndrome alarm bells.

But one thing I've learned: Good things happen when you put yourself in rooms where you don’t feel like you belong.

The real secret isn't getting into the rooms, though. It's what you do once you're in them...
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This episode brought to you by:
DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. 
Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial Advisor. Track your spending, investments, and net worth—all in one place.
Innerbody Labs - A Higher Standard. After reviewing thousands of health products, we built formulas we wished existed.
Lemon - The Al agent that turns your voice instructions into finished tasks.

We all fall into the same trap: measuring what's easy instead of what's meaningful, clinging to routines we know instead of adapting ones that work, and asking the questions we can answer instead of the ones we're avoiding.
In this podcast, I break down the street light effect — the tendency to search where there's light rather than where there's truth — and share how it showed up in my own career, content journey, and relationships.
I'll walk you through 3 questions that changed my approach...
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This episode brought to you by:
DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. 
Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial Advisor. Track your spending, investments, and net worth—all in one place.
Innerbody Labs - A Higher Standard. After reviewing thousands of health products, we built formulas we wished existed.
Lemon - The Al agent that turns your voice instructions into finished tasks.