PN | Weekly #15: May 17, 2026
“Victims and villains do not create meaning for themselves or for the world. Heroes and guides do. We build lives of meaning by stating an ambition, by enduring challenges, and by sharing our lives with others.”DONALD MILLER |
Happy Sunday Heroic!
Michael here. 👋
When I picked up this week’s new PN, on Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent, I was immediately transported back to Ben’s home office at the end of an incredible afternoon together.
As we shared hugs, appreciation, and goodbye’s, I started to tell him my favorite part of The Science of Scaling.
Before I got the sentence out, he finished it for me.
"The appendix. Linear vs. Holistic time."
Yup.
Time is an asset. A tool.
Linear time tells you who you've been. Holistic time lets who you're becoming pull you forward.
In linear time, your past personality is your ceiling. In holistic time, your future self is your floor.
And the ideas that Ben shares in Personality Isn’t Permanent help us to take that concept and actually apply it to our lives.
Here’s how Matthew McConaughey frames it, in a speech for winning Academy Award for Best Actor:
“When I was fifteen years old, I had a very important person in my life come to me and say, ‘Who’s your hero?’ And I said . . . “You know who it is? It’s me in ten years.’ So I turned twenty-five. Ten years later, the same person comes to me and says, ‘So, are you a hero?’ And I was like, ‘Not even close! No, no, no.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because my hero’s me at thirty-five.’ So you see, every day, every week, every month, and every year of my life, my hero’s always ten years away. I’m never gonna be my hero. I’m not gonna attain that. I know I’m not, and that’s just fine with me, because that keeps me with someone to keep on chasing.”
You, the hero.
Eudaimonia.
These aren’t destinations to be reached.
They’re ways of being to live from.
Moment to moment to moment.
Let’s do that.
Today!
-Michael
Enjoy this past week's featured Notes!
The Champion's Mind
by Jim Afremow
by David Brooks
Discourses
by Epictetus
Personality Isn't Permanent
by Dr. Benjamin Hardy
by Tom Rath
by Darrin Donnelly
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“A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo.”JOSEPH CAMPBELL |
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