Do you ask yourself why?
Not "why me," feeling sorry for yourself. The other kind. You go through something and instead of just moving on, you sit with it. You ask what it means. You build a reason for why it happened, and more often than not, you find a throughline other people would've missed.
Turns out, by a lot of measures, the guys who do that are living better.
The concept hopefully isn't foreign, we hear a version of this in business all the time. Simon Sinek built one of the most watched TED Talks ever around a similar idea: start with why.
But there's another version of that question, applied to how you actually live.
The Dads Who Find Meaning Are Having a Better Time
I've been thinking about this a lot since June, when I interviewed Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor at USC who studies dad brains (literally).
In her research on new parents, she found that the ones who could take the chaos of childbirth and turn it into a coherent story — pointing out silver linings, making sense of what happened instead of just letting it wash over them — reported lower stress and better relationships months later. Psychologists call this "meaning-making."
The meaning wasn't sitting there waiting to be found. They built it.
The Man Who Named It
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna before World War 2 took everything from him. His wife, his parents, his work, all of it gone in the concentration camps.
He survived Auschwitz, and afterward he wrote about it. He watched who survived and who didn't. The ones who made it, he said, weren't always the strongest or the luckiest. What set them apart was something narrower, and stranger, and in a way more available to anyone. Even with everything taken from them, even unable to control a single thing that happened to them, they held onto the one freedom nobody could touch. The freedom to decide what it meant.
How they made sense of what they were living through.
He built an entire school of psychology out of that one observation and called it logotherapy. Meaning isn't something you find lying around. It's something you decide.
The Book I Still Think About
Thirty years ago, junior year of high school, Mrs. Eddy put a book in my hands called A Prayer for Owen Meany. It's about a kid, small for his age, strange voice, who lives about as hard a life as you can write. Through loss after loss, Owen never once thinks it's just happening to him. He doesn't know the why. But he's certain a why exists.
Thirty years later I still think about that kid, and how he knew the events of his life were adding up to something spectacular.
It's all right.
That's the whole book in three words, and it's become something like a personal philosophy of mine. You get to decide what it adds up to.
Why It's Easy to Just Give Up
So much feels out of our hands right now. The job market, the dating pool, whether AI will take over. And for some guys, the answer is to just throw in the towel.
Read enough of that and giving up starts to look like the reasonable move.
Until you find out the truth.
Harvard researchers followed more than 13,000 American adults for eight years and found that the people with the lowest sense of purpose in life were more than twice as likely to have died by the end of that stretch than the people with the highest sense of purpose, even after accounting for their health, income, and everything else researchers could control for.
Twice as likely.
Not a supplement.
Not a routine.
A decision about how your life adds up.
None of that makes the hard stuff stop being hard. Chaos is still chaos while you're standing in it. But you get to decide what it adds up to once you're on the other side.
Things don't just work out. They work out because you decide they do.
For us, it always tracks back to building confidence. Meaning is built the same way everything worth having is built: one decision at a time, out of whatever you've actually got in front of you.
The Key to a Longer, Better Life (No Supplements Required)
Do you ask yourself why?
Not "why me," feeling sorry for yourself. The other kind. You go through something and instead of just moving on, you sit with it. You ask what it means. You build a reason for why it happened, and more often than not, you find a throughline other people would've missed.
Turns out, by a lot of measures, the guys who do that are living better.
The concept hopefully isn't foreign, we hear a version of this in business all the time. Simon Sinek built one of the most watched TED Talks ever around a similar idea: start with why.
But there's another version of that question, applied to how you actually live.
The Dads Who Find Meaning Are Having a Better Time
I've been thinking about this a lot since June, when I interviewed Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor at USC who studies dad brains (literally).
In her research on new parents, she found that the ones who could take the chaos of childbirth and turn it into a coherent story — pointing out silver linings, making sense of what happened instead of just letting it wash over them — reported lower stress and better relationships months later. Psychologists call this "meaning-making."
The meaning wasn't sitting there waiting to be found. They built it.
The Man Who Named It
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna before World War 2 took everything from him. His wife, his parents, his work, all of it gone in the concentration camps.
He survived Auschwitz, and afterward he wrote about it. He watched who survived and who didn't. The ones who made it, he said, weren't always the strongest or the luckiest. What set them apart was something narrower, and stranger, and in a way more available to anyone. Even with everything taken from them, even unable to control a single thing that happened to them, they held onto the one freedom nobody could touch. The freedom to decide what it meant.
How they made sense of what they were living through.
He built an entire school of psychology out of that one observation and called it logotherapy. Meaning isn't something you find lying around. It's something you decide.
The Book I Still Think About
Thirty years ago, junior year of high school, Mrs. Eddy put a book in my hands called A Prayer for Owen Meany. It's about a kid, small for his age, strange voice, who lives about as hard a life as you can write. Through loss after loss, Owen never once thinks it's just happening to him. He doesn't know the why. But he's certain a why exists.
Thirty years later I still think about that kid, and how he knew the events of his life were adding up to something spectacular.
It's all right.
That's the whole book in three words, and it's become something like a personal philosophy of mine. You get to decide what it adds up to.
Why It's Easy to Just Give Up
So much feels out of our hands right now. The job market, the dating pool, whether AI will take over. And for some guys, the answer is to just throw in the towel.
Read enough of that and giving up starts to look like the reasonable move.
Until you find out the truth.
Harvard researchers followed more than 13,000 American adults for eight years and found that the people with the lowest sense of purpose in life were more than twice as likely to have died by the end of that stretch than the people with the highest sense of purpose, even after accounting for their health, income, and everything else researchers could control for.
Twice as likely.
Not a supplement.
Not a routine.
A decision about how your life adds up.
None of that makes the hard stuff stop being hard. Chaos is still chaos while you're standing in it. But you get to decide what it adds up to once you're on the other side.
Things don't just work out. They work out because you decide they do.
For us, it always tracks back to building confidence. Meaning is built the same way everything worth having is built: one decision at a time, out of whatever you've actually got in front of you.