I’m in Miami this week for a keynote, so I’m hitting replay on a reader favorite that feels just as relevant today. Enjoy!
Many influencers have a morning routine more complicated than a NASA launch sequence.
They do yoga, meditate, run several miles, do a cold plunge, and warm up some raw milk from their pet goat—all before the rest of us hit snooze for the first time.
There’s an entire parade of followers marching behind, mimicking every ritual—from waking up at the crack of dawn to enduring the icy ordeal of cold showers that leave them shivering and questioning their life choices.
Yet the promised nirvana still remains just out of reach.
Instead of feeling enlightened, we’re left scratching our heads, pondering whether we didn’t meditate quite right or perhaps our smoothie lacked that crucial superfood.
This pervasive feeling of falling short has become a silent epidemic. We keep chasing, but the finish line keeps moving. And somewhere deep down, we keep wondering: Is this roadmap leading us in circles?
For many people, these “inspiring” standards and routines often do the opposite. They end up more anxious, more defeated, and more stuck in the same cycle they were trying to escape in the first place.
Let’s pull back this curtain of “perfection.”
I’ve now spent enough time with enough influencers behind closed doors that I know one thing: Their off-camera life is rarely Instagram-worthy.
The people we put on a pedestal often don’t live up to their carefully curated personas. The best-selling low-carb diet book author devours foods that make your cheat meals look healthy. (I’ve seen this firsthand numerous times.) The famous productivity expert wastes an hour every day scrolling through social media. The meditation guru, a champion of zen in every aspect of life, transforms into a horn-honking gremlin in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
My goal isn’t to discredit these influencers. It’s to inject a dose of reality into how we consume their advice, and remind people to take the “crush it” culture with a healthy pinch of salt (or a full shaker, depending on the influencer).
After all, if the people selling us the roadmap to enlightenment aren’t following their own advice, perhaps the path isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be.
As the saying goes, be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.
We’re often given a single narrative about what makes life worth living. Just follow this one path, the story goes, and you’ll get your happy ending.
But the paths and the plots are multiple. In attempting to duplicate someone else’s seemingly happy ending, we end up deleting the possible plots of our own life. We become a silent extra in the background of someone else’s movie.
In the end, the journey to self-improvement isn’t about copying someone else’s highlight reel.
It’s about finding the rhythm that feels like yours, imperfections and all.
And maybe, just maybe, laughing at the absurdity of milking a goat at dawn.
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