Radical Acceptance and Other Goals

Show Notes

We started this one by looking backward before we looked forward. Dan pulled together the stats on our first partial year — seventeen audio releases, sixteen on YouTube, a couple thousand engagements, and somewhere around sixteen or seventeen subscribers I genuinely didn't know. That last part still gets me. This thing started as two friends finding an excuse to spend more time together, and then strangers found it. So before we got into 2025 goals, I wanted to just sit in the gratitude of that for a second. Thank you, whoever you are.

Then we dug into Dan's list, which ran eight or nine items long and was, in his words, mostly unmeasurable — broad notes on how he wants to be rather than what he wants to hit. Quality of presence sat at the top, and it's a phrase that's followed us across a few episodes now. It's the act of being where you're supposed to be and not getting dragged off somewhere else — at work you work, when you play with your kids you play with your kids. Simple to say, brutally hard to do as a distracted adult with a broken dopamine chain and a phone surgically attached to your hip. We both confessed we fail at it constantly. The fix is unglamorous: phone on the counter, on silent, until the kids are down. The act of being "off," fully.

My side of the list leaned the other direction — I wanted numbers. A hundred bike rides next year, doubling my fifty from this one. Fifty thousand words of creative writing, which sounds like a tidy thousand a week until you realize how many weeks you'll write zero. The point isn't really the number, it's the flywheel: heavy and miserable to get spinning, but once it's going, sitting down to write becomes the easy part and you spend your energy on the actual work instead of the activation. I want the muscle there for when the idea finally shows up. Dan kept pushing me on my "AI integration" line too, and we landed somewhere real — I don't want twelve employees, I want a workforce of fifty where the other thirty-eight are agents taking the drudgery off my people so they can be maximized.

The conversation kept circling a deeper thing, which is the story we tell ourselves. Dan said something that stuck with me — that he's blown up his own life a couple of times on purpose, and that messes with your relationship to your own narrative. I floated the idea that a lot of our misery is the mismatch between the internal story and the external one, or worse, living out a story someone else prescribed for you. That's where the word abnegation surfaced — denying yourself what you actually want for the sake of what you think others expect, which conveniently also offloads the risk. If it doesn't work out, well, it wasn't your call. We agreed the people who do this most are often the ones who never figured out what they wanted in the first place.

Dan named the spine of his whole list: radical acceptance. Not nihilism, not throwing your hands up at the horror of the world, and not the wave-of-evil version where you just go along. It's the Serenity Prayer pushed one step further — sort the world into what you can control, what you can only do your part in, and what you have zero say over, and stop spending your life energy blaming that last bucket. He paired it with David Deutsch's brand of optimism — the Beginning of Infinity, glass-half-full, "yes that's a problem, but how might we fix it" — and the two ideas turned out to fit together neatly. Accept that things aren't perfect, then stay optimistic they'll get better, because they have been for a long while now. And we reminded ourselves we're more plastic than we give ourselves credit for; the old idea that the brain stops reshaping at twenty-two just isn't true.

He closed on the line I'd been quietly hoping he'd explain — "you can't save souls in an empty church." Our church isn't empty anymore, which is the whole point. We're throwing our own exploration out into the world to see if anyone latches on, and slowly, somebody is. So leave your 2025 goals in the comments, we're getting an email address, and yes, Dan, my first agent is going to be the one that handles all the mail you're about to send us. Here's to going and finding out.

— Sean