All Or Somethin is a weekly newsletter for people who are figuring it out as they go. Formerly Appearing Superhuman. Less pressure in the name. Same everything else.

Before The Good Stuff:

Most productive month I've had in a long time. Maybe ever. The newsletter is back. I built my own habit tracking app from scratch. I even made chicken parmesan from scratch this week for the first time in ages. The energy is there and things are getting done.

The honest part: I'm hitting most of my list every week except the one or two things that would actually move the needle. That's always how it goes. The hard thing stays at the bottom.

This week I hit a wall. A few days where the overwhelm crept in and I couldn't shake it. Unusual for me lately. Jocko Willink has a line I keep coming back to in those moments: if you want to take a break, do it tomorrow. Procrastinate the procrastination. If you still want to stop tomorrow then maybe your body is sending you a signal worth listening to.

I didn't stop. The next two weeks are about showing up for the right things.

[WATCH] Casey Neistat - Navigating the Matrix

My wife and I watched every single one of Casey's daily vlogs. All 1000 of them. This feels like that Casey. The one who made something instead of just talking about making something.

The video is built around a simple four-quadrant matrix of how every day actually feels. Things you want to do but shouldn't. Things you need to do but dread. Things you do just to avoid the real work. And then the green quadrant. The stuff you want to do and should do and somehow still avoid.

The matrix is fun, but the insight underneath it is the one worth sitting with. Productive work leaves something behind. Busy work evaporates. At the end of the day you either finished the thing or you didn't. And only one of those actually accumulates.

➡️ Watch it here

[READ] George Mack - High Agency In 30 Minutes

I dropped out at 16. Got my GED weeks later. Moved across the country with no money in my pocket and nothing figured out. I spent years thinking I was just stubborn and difficult. This piece made me stop seeing it as a character flaw.

It's called high agency. And this is the best thing I've read on it.

The killer opener starts like this:

You wake up in a third world jail cell. One call. Who do you dial and why?

That person has something you can't quite name. Mack names it. Here are some of my favorite pieces from this one:

• Optimism says the glass is half full. Pessimism says half empty. High agency says you're a tap.
• The first ten bullets on how to spot a high agency person are worth the trip alone. Skim those at minimum.
• Normal behavior is forgotten. Only weird survives. The bill you pick up for the whole table becomes everyone's favorite memory of you. The flight across the world for a friend's birthday is the story they tell at your wedding.
• Ask yourself: if I had 10x the agency I have right now, what would I do? It's a grenade for wherever you feel stuck.
• The Derek Sivers mentor trick near the end is absolutely worth stealing.

Go read this one slowly.

➡️ Read it here

[WATCH] Jeff Su - Learn 80% of Claude Cowork in Under 20 Minutes

I've been using Claude Chat for months. Cowork does everything Chat does except it actually does the work instead of telling you how.

Cowork intimidated me. I didn't know what an MCP was. Still not sure I fully do. I worried it would burn through my usage limits, mess up files on my computer, or access my accounts in ways I didn't sign up for. Turns out you can fence it into one folder on your desktop and it won't touch anything outside of it. The guardrails are better than I expected.

I watched this video, opened Cowork the same day, and built a working app for an idea I'd been sitting on for years. Published it online. Works on mobile. I didn't know that was something I could do in an afternoon.

The thing nobody explains well: Chat gives you answers. Cowork drops finished files in your folder. And the longer you use it, the better it gets because it writes what it learns about you to files on your computer and pulls them up every session. It remembers. Chat mostly doesn't.

Watch this with Cowork open so you can adjust your settings as you go. Then just start building something.

➡️ Watch it here

[LISTEN] Morgan Housel - The Unexpected Laws of Personal Finance 

Morgan Housel wrote Psychology of Money. I recommend it more than almost any book I own. I never miss his newsletter. So when I saw his name on a podcast I already loved, it was an instant bookmark.

This one is less about how to build wealth and more about how to think about what to do with it. The stories are the point.

A few that stuck out to me:

The wolf tracker. Someone should GPS tag wealthy people the way researchers track wolves in the wild. Map out exactly which square footage of their 12,000 foot mansion they actually use. For most it's probably the same 1,500 feet they lived in when they were 22. Harvey Firestone wrote about this in the 1920s. Every wealthy person he knew bought a gigantic house. Every single one found it to be a tremendous burden. And yet. People keep doing it.

The sweater and the scar. Two studies, same lesson. In one, a researcher put a woman in a comically hideous sweater and sent her into a party. She came out convinced everyone had noticed. Researchers went back in and asked. Nobody remembered her.

In another, researchers told participants they were getting a fake scar applied to their face for an interview. Right before they walked in, they removed it without telling them. The participants spent the entire interview convinced the interviewer couldn't stop staring. The scar wasn't even there. The most valuable financial asset you can have, Housel says, is not needing to impress strangers. We massively overestimate how much anyone is watching.

The FIRE movement. Financial independence, retire early. Sounds like the dream. Except a lot of the people who actually pulled it off were clinically depressed six months later. Turns out the work wasn't the problem. The work was the point. Meaning, structure, problems worth solving. The goal was never to stop working. It was to work on things that matter. Worth sitting with if you're building something of your own.

The grandpa ski lift. A wealthy grandfather didn't want his grandkids to be spoiled. So before he'd buy anyone a lift ticket, they had to hike up the hill first. The lesson he wanted to teach: hard work. The lesson they actually learned: grandpa's an asshole. The gap between the lesson intended and the lesson received is everywhere in how we talk about money, ambition, and what we pass down.

Jenny Jerome. Winston Churchill's mother dined with Prime Minister Gladstone one night and his rival Disraeli the next. Afterward she said: when I left dinner with Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. When I left dinner with Disraeli, I felt like I was the cleverest woman. Some people are interesting. Some people make you feel interesting. Only one of those leaves a mark.

Here's the line that's been living in my head since I watched this:

Wealth is being who you want to be. There are billionaires with no control over their time. There are people making $50,000 a year with complete freedom over where they live, what they do, and who they spend it with. The number is not the thing. The independence is the thing.

➡️ Listen to it here

Question I'm Pondering This Week:

George Mack opens his piece with this: 

You wake up in a third world jail cell. One call. Who do you dial? 

You already know the answer. 

Now sit with why. What is it about that person that made you pick up the phone?

P.S. Can you keep up?