Nolan Rumble: Blog

Stop Chasing Happiness. Start Building This Instead.

2026-03-20T00:00:00Z

A Quick Recap

What a journey it has been.

In Post 1, we met Alex — outwardly fine, inwardly restless — and established that honest self-awareness is where all real growth begins.

In Post 2, we loosened the white-knuckle grip of control, and learned to direct energy toward what we can actually influence rather than exhaust ourselves on everything we can't.

In Post 3, we stepped out of the imagined spotlight and discovered that the freedom to show up more honestly was always available — we'd just been too busy performing for an audience that wasn't watching as closely as we feared.

In Post 4, we walked through the doorway guarded by discomfort — and Alex had the conversation that four months of avoidance had been quietly dismantling a friendship to prevent.

In Post 5, we sat with perhaps the hardest truth of all: that some of the things that shaped us most deeply were not our fault — and that the next chapter of our story belongs to us anyway.

Each post moved Alex a little further. Each one asked something real.

Today, we arrive at the final truth. The one that, in many ways, reframes all the others. And it begins — as the best insights often do — with a question Alex had never quite thought to ask.

The Question Nobody Had Asked

Several months had passed since Alex's journey through these five truths had quietly begun. The changes weren't dramatic from the outside. Alex still went to work. Still showed up for the same people. Still had hard days and ordinary ones and the occasional Wednesday that felt like it was held together with good intentions and not much else.

But something had shifted in the interior landscape. The grip was looser. The performing was less constant. The avoided things were getting named, and sometimes — not always, but sometimes — actually addressed. The old story of this was done to me and I'm still waiting for it to be undone had softened into something more like this happened and here is what I'm choosing to do with it.

It was during a quiet conversation with a trusted friend — the same one from Post 4, the friendship now warmer and more honest than it had been in years — that a simple question arrived unexpectedly:

"Are you happy?"

Alex paused. Really paused. Not performing consideration, but actually sitting with the question as though encountering it for the first time.

And the honest answer — the one that surfaced before the polished version could arrive — was surprising:

"I don't know. But I think I'm something better than happy."

The Problem with Happiness as a Destination

Most of us have been quietly running a happiness programme in the background of our lives for as long as we can remember. It sounds something like this:

When I get the promotion, I'll be happy. When the relationship is in a better place, I'll be happy. When I'm healthier, more financially stable, more settled, more certain — then I'll be happy.

The problem is not the desire for happiness. The desire for happiness is human and understandable and not something to be argued with. The problem is the architecture of the pursuit — the way we position happiness as a destination rather than a quality of experience. As a state to arrive at rather than something that moves and shifts and visits in moments rather than staying permanently.

Psychology has a term for what happens when we do arrive at the things we thought would make us happy: hedonistic adaptation. It describes the remarkably consistent human tendency to return to a baseline level of well-being relatively quickly after both positive and negative life events.

The promotion feels extraordinary — for a while. The new relationship, the new home, the achieved goal — all of it registers as meaningful and then, with surprising predictability, normalises. The emotional system recalibrates. The thing that was supposed to be the answer becomes the new baseline, and the search for the next answer quietly resumes.

This is not cynicism. It is neuroscience. And understanding it is not a reason to stop pursuing good things — it is a reason to stop expecting those things to deliver a permanent emotional state they were never designed to provide.

What Research Actually Says About Well-being

In the 1990s, psychologist Martin Seligman — one of the founders of positive psychology — began asking a different question. Not what makes people happy? but what allows people to flourish?

What he and subsequent researchers found consistently was this: the people who reported the deepest, most durable sense of well-being were not necessarily the ones who felt the most pleasure. They were the ones who experienced the most meaning.

Meaning, as distinct from happiness, tends to come from four primary sources:

Belonging — feeling genuinely connected to others, in relationships that involve being truly known rather than just liked.

Purpose — having something to work toward that feels larger than immediate self-interest. Contributing to something — a person, a community, a craft, an idea — that matters beyond the moment.

Storytelling — the ability to make sense of your own life. To find a coherent thread through the difficult chapters as well as the easier ones. To understand your struggles as part of something rather than evidence of everything going wrong.

Transcendence — moments where the boundary between self and something larger temporarily dissolves. These can come through nature, creativity, spirituality, deep human connection, or any experience that briefly makes the ego feel small in a way that feels, strangely, like expansion.

None of these are happiness in the conventional sense. None of them are comfortable in the way that pleasure is comfortable. In fact, a meaningful life frequently involves discomfort — the difficulty of deep relationship, the frustration of pursuing something hard, the grief of loss that only comes from having loved something. Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor whose work on meaning became foundational in modern psychology, observed that meaning could be found even in suffering — not because suffering is good, but because the human capacity to respond to it with purpose is extraordinary.

Happiness asks: how do I feel right now?

Meaning asks: does this matter?

They are not opposites. But they are different questions. And the second one tends to build something more durable.

The Shift Alex Hadn't Expected

Looking back over the months since that first quiet moment of honest restlessness, Alex noticed something that hadn't been anticipated at the start of any of this.

The pursuit of feeling better had slowly given way to something else. Not the absence of difficult feelings — those still arrived, reliably and without much warning. Not a life free of hard days or complicated people or unresolved questions.

But the hard days had started to feel less like evidence that something was wrong and more like the natural texture of a life being genuinely lived. The complicated people had started to feel less like obstacles and more like invitations to practice the things Alex was slowly, imperfectly learning. The unresolved questions — about meaning, about purpose, about what it all added up to — had started to feel less like problems and more like the honest company of a thoughtful human life.

Alex had stopped, without fully realising it, trying to arrive somewhere.

And in that stopping — in the willingness to be here, in this, with all its difficulty and all its ordinary beauty — something had quietly taken root that felt more solid than happiness had ever felt.

It felt like meaning. And it felt, unexpectedly, like enough.

Happiness vs. Meaning: The Practical Distinction

This is not a post that argues against happiness. Pleasure matters. Joy matters. Ease and lightness and laughter — all of it matters and none of it should be discarded in the name of some grim pursuit of depth.

The shift being proposed is subtler than that. It is a reorientation of the primary question. From:

How do I feel? → Does this matter to me? Am I comfortable? → Am I growing? Am I getting what I want? → Am I becoming who I want to be? Is life going my way? → Am I showing up in my life?

These are not always comfortable questions. But they are the questions that, answered honestly and regularly, tend to produce a life that — even in its difficult chapters — feels like yours. Feels like something chosen rather than something endured.

And there is a quiet, durable satisfaction in that which pleasure, on its own, has never quite been able to replicate.

Practical Moves: Building a Life Oriented Around Meaning

1. Identify Your "Mattering" List Set aside the question of what makes you happy for a moment. Instead ask: what makes me feel like I matter? What makes me feel like what I'm doing matters? The answers to those questions are the threads of a meaningful life. Follow them.

2. Invest in Depth Over Breadth Meaning tends to come from depth — in relationships, in work, in creative or intellectual pursuits — rather than from accumulation. Where in your life could you go deeper rather than wider?

3. Reframe the Hard Chapters Viktor Frankl's insight was that suffering without meaning is unbearable, but suffering understood as part of something larger becomes navigable. When something difficult is happening, try asking: what does this have to teach me? What is this making me capable of? Not to minimize it — but to find the thread.

4. Practice Contribution Some of the most reliable meaning available to any human being comes from contributing to something beyond themselves. This doesn't need to be grand. It can be as simple as being genuinely present for someone who needs it, doing your work with real care, or showing up honestly in a relationship. Contribution at any scale generates meaning.

5. Notice the Transcendent Moments They are already in your life. The conversation that went somewhere real. The piece of music that briefly made everything feel connected. The moment in nature where the usual mental noise went quiet. These moments are not accidents — they are data about what matters to you. Pay attention to them.

Where Alex Landed

Alex's story doesn't end with a resolution. There's no summit moment, no final arrival, no tidy conclusion that ties every thread into a bow.

There is, instead, a Thursday evening. Ordinary light through an ordinary window. A cup of tea that's slightly too hot to drink yet. A notebook open on the table — not filled with brilliant insights, just honest ones.

Alex is thinking about the question the friend had asked. Are you happy?

And about the answer that had come before the polished version could arrive.

I don't know. But I think I'm something better than happy.

What Alex is, sitting at that table on that ordinary Thursday, is present. Engaged with a life that is imperfect and unfinished and sometimes hard and genuinely, quietly rich. Invested in relationships that have been allowed to get real. Doing work with more intention than before. Sitting with questions instead of outrunning them. Showing up — imperfectly, honestly, consistently — for the one life available.

That is not happiness in the conventional sense. It is something more durable, more honest, and — in the end — more worth building.

It is a meaningful life. In progress. Exactly as it should be.

A Final Word — To You

If you have followed Alex through all six of these posts, something in you was already oriented toward growth before you arrived here. These truths are not easy. They were never going to be. But they are real, and they are workable, and the life on the other side of genuinely engaging with them is different — quieter in some ways, richer in others — than the life of avoiding them.

You didn't choose every part of your story. You do get to choose what you build with it.

That is not a small thing.

That is, actually, everything.

Thank you for reading The Truths That Set Us Free. If this series has resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it — and leave a comment below about which truth landed most deeply. The conversation doesn't have to end here.

It's Not Your Fault — But It Is Your Life

2026-03-19T00:00:00Z

A Quick Recap

In Post 1, we met Alex — quietly exhausted by a life that looked fine from the outside but felt heavy from the inside — and established that honest self-awareness is where real growth begins.

In Post 2, we explored the illusion of control and the freedom that comes from directing energy toward what we can actually influence.

In Post 3, we uncovered the spotlight effect — and Alex took the first small, brave step of showing up more honestly in a room full of people who turned out to be far less focused on Alex's stumbles than Alex was.

In Post 4, we walked through the hidden cost of avoidance, and watched Alex finally have a four-months-postponed conversation that took forty-five minutes and cost nothing close to what the dread had suggested.

Each post has moved Alex a little further forward. A little more honest. A little more willing.

Today, we arrive at the truth that may be the hardest of all five — not because it asks the most of you intellectually, but because it asks the most of you emotionally.

It is the distinction between fault and responsibility. And once you really understand it, very little looks the same afterward.

The Afternoon Alex Didn't See Coming

It started as an ordinary Sunday.

Alex had been in a reflective mood lately — the kind that follows a stretch of genuine growth, where the quiet moments stop being something to fill and start being something to actually sit with. The parking lot, the presentation, the friendship conversation — they had all left a residue of something Alex was still learning to name. Openness, maybe. Or just a slightly looser grip on the idea that life had to be managed rather than lived.

Then a family member called. And in the course of a conversation that started casually and shifted without warning, something old surfaced. A memory. A pattern from childhood that Alex had spent years quietly working around rather than working through. Something that hadn't been Alex's fault — that much was clear, and had always been clear — but that had shaped Alex's emotional landscape in ways that still showed up uninvited: in relationships, in the reflexive over-functioning, in the difficulty receiving care without suspicion.

After the call, Alex sat for a long time.

Not with anger. Not even with sadness, exactly. With something more complicated — the particular weight of understanding, finally and fully, that some of the most formative things in your life were things you had absolutely no say in. And that you still, somehow, have to figure out what to do with them.

The Hardest Truth in the Series

Here it is, plainly:

Many of the things that shaped you were not your fault. And they are still yours to navigate.

This is not a cruel paradox. It is actually one of the most compassionate frameworks available for understanding a human life. But it requires holding two things at once that the mind desperately wants to keep separate:

You did not cause this — and — You are the one who gets to decide what happens next.

Our culture tends to collapse these two into one. We treat responsibility as though it implies fault — as though saying "this is mine to work with" means "this was my doing." And so people either carry guilt for things that were never their fault, or they resist responsibility entirely because accepting it feels like accepting blame.

Neither position is particularly freeing. And neither moves anything forward.

Fault Looks Backward. Responsibility Looks Forward.

This distinction is worth sitting with, because it changes the entire frame.

Fault is a backward-looking concept. It asks: who caused this? It is about origin — about tracing the line from effect back to cause and assigning it somewhere. Fault has its place, particularly in legal and ethical contexts. But as a framework for living a meaningful life, it has serious limitations. You cannot change what caused something. You can only change what you do with it now.

Responsibility is a forward-looking concept. It asks: what is mine to do next? It is not about origin — it doesn't care who started it or why. It cares about agency. About what is actually available to you from where you are standing right now.

The psychologist Edith Eger, a Holocaust survivor who went on to become a therapist and author, put it in a way that is difficult to improve upon. Having experienced one of the most extreme examples of suffering that was categorically not her fault, she arrived at this: we cannot choose what happens to us, but we can choose how we respond. And that choice — fragile, hard-won, sometimes barely available — is where human dignity lives.

This is not a demand that you heal quickly, or forgive easily, or minimize what was done or what was lost. It is simply an observation that the part of your story still being written is the part that belongs to you.

Why This Truth Is So Difficult to Accept

There are two very understandable reasons people resist the fault-responsibility distinction, and both deserve acknowledgment.

The first is that accepting responsibility can feel like letting someone off the hook.

If Alex says "this shaped me and I'm responsible for what I do with it now," does that mean the person or circumstance that caused it gets a pass? Does moving forward mean pretending it didn't happen, or that it didn't matter?

No. It doesn't. Responsibility is not absolution. You can hold someone accountable for what they did and take responsibility for your own healing. These are not in conflict. In fact, staying frozen in fault — waiting for acknowledgment, waiting for justice, waiting for the other person to change — often means handing your own forward movement to someone who may never give it back.

The second is that it can feel profoundly unfair.

Because it is. There is nothing fair about having to navigate the emotional consequences of something you didn't cause. Nothing fair about working hard to heal from a wound you didn't choose. The unfairness is real, and it deserves to be named without qualification.

And yet — life, with extraordinary consistency, does not repair itself on the basis of fairness. It moves forward when people decide, however reluctantly and however imperfectly, to take the next step anyway.

The Difference Between Self-Blame and Self-Agency

It is worth being very precise here, because this is where the concept most often gets distorted.

Taking responsibility for your life is not the same as blaming yourself for your struggles.

Self-blame says: I am broken. This is my fault. I should be further along.

Self-agency says: This is hard and it wasn't my fault. And I still get to choose my next step.

One collapses you. The other moves you.

Alex had spent years in a quiet, unacknowledged relationship with self-blame — not dramatic or obvious, but present in the way Alex over-apologized, over-functioned, and made it difficult to receive help without feeling like it needed to be immediately repaid. Patterns that made complete sense given their origin. And patterns that, once seen clearly, became things Alex could actually work with rather than simply repeat.

That is what self-agency looks like in practice. Not strength. Not the absence of difficulty. Just the quiet, determined willingness to look clearly at what is, and then decide what comes next.

What Helped Alex

The Sunday after that family phone call, Alex did something new.

Instead of filing the surfaced memory away — the old, practiced move — Alex wrote about it. Not for anyone else. Not polished or structured. Just honest. What happened. How it had shaped things. What patterns Alex could now trace back to it like threads in a piece of fabric.

And then — and this was the part that surprised Alex — Alex wrote about what was actually available now. Not to fix the past. Not to assign blame or resolve anything neatly. Just: given all of this, what do I actually want to do next?

It was a short list. Three things. All of them forward-facing.

No one saw it. Nothing changed immediately. But something in the act of writing it — of claiming agency over the next chapter without pretending the previous ones hadn't happened — felt different from anything Alex had done before.

Not better. Not fixed. Just... more honest. And more free.

Practical Moves: Stepping from Fault into Responsibility

1. Separate the Two Questions Practice consciously distinguishing whose fault was this? from what is mine to do now? They are different questions. You are allowed — encouraged, even — to answer the first one honestly. And then to set it aside long enough to answer the second.

2. Write the "Given All This" Letter Not to send. Just for yourself. Write honestly about something that shaped you — something that wasn't your fault. Then write a second section that starts: Given all of this, what do I want to do next? The shift between sections is the shift from fault to responsibility.

3. Name Your Patterns Without Judgment Most of the patterns that come from old wounds make complete sense given where they came from. They were adaptations — smart ones, once. See them clearly without shaming them. And then ask whether they are still serving you now.

4. Find the Edge of Your Agency For any situation that feels stuck, ask: Is there anything — even one small thing — that is within my power to change here? Often there is. Starting there, however small it feels, is where movement begins.

5. Let Healing Be Nonlinear Responsibility doesn't mean a straight line to resolution. You will circle back. Old patterns will resurface. This is not failure — it is how the human nervous system works. Compassion for the process is not a luxury. It is part of the process.

The Deeper Gift

Here is what Alex discovered on that Sunday, sitting with something old and finally looking at it directly:

The story wasn't over. It had never been over. The past was real, and it had shaped things — genuinely, meaningfully, in ways that mattered. And it did not get to write the rest.

That is the deeper gift inside this hardest of truths. Not that fault doesn't matter. Not that the past wasn't real. But that the next chapter — however imperfect, however slowly written — belongs to you.

That is not a small thing. That is, actually, everything.

Where We're Going Next

In our final post, we arrive at the truth that quietly underpins all the others — and the one that surprised Alex most of all.

Most of us have spent our lives chasing happiness. Post 6 asks a different question: What if meaning is the better destination? And what does a life oriented around meaning actually look like in practice?

Alex's story lands somewhere in that final post. And it lands somewhere that feels, finally, like solid ground.

The Things You're Avoiding Are Trying to Help You

2026-03-18T00:00:00Z

A Quick Recap

In Post 1, we introduced Alex — and the idea that growth begins not with optimism, but with honest self-awareness.

In Post 2, we explored the exhausting grip of control — and why loosening it isn't giving up, but growing up.

In Post 3, we uncovered the spotlight effect — the psychological phenomenon that has most of us editing and performing for an audience that is far less attentive than we fear. Alex took a quiet but meaningful step: offering a half-formed idea in a meeting, and discovering that imperfection didn't just survive — it sparked something.

Today, we go somewhere that is perhaps the most practically challenging of all five truths. Because this one doesn't just ask you to think differently. It asks you to move toward the very things your instincts are telling you to move away from.

This is the truth about avoidance. And it changes everything.

The Conversation That Kept Getting Postponed

There was a conversation Alex had been not-having for about four months.

It was with a close friend — someone Alex genuinely cared about — over something that had happened that had quietly shifted the dynamic between them. Nothing dramatic. No blowup. Just a moment where something was said, a boundary was bumped, and instead of addressing it, Alex had done what so many of us do with such elegant efficiency:

Filed it away. Stayed busy. Told themselves it wasn't a big deal. Waited for it to resolve itself.

It hadn't resolved itself. It had, instead, done what unaddressed things reliably do — it had grown. Not louder, but heavier. The friendship had taken on a faint but persistent awkwardness. Texts that used to be easy now carried a slight hesitation. Plans that used to be made spontaneously now required more internal convincing.

Alex knew, somewhere honest, exactly what was happening.

And Alex kept not having the conversation.

Why We Avoid: The Brain's Cost-Benefit Miscalculation

Avoidance is not laziness. It is not weakness. It is, in fact, one of the most sophisticated things the human brain does — a rapid, largely unconscious cost-benefit calculation designed to protect you from pain.

The logic runs something like this: this thing feels threatening. If I engage with it, I might feel worse. If I don't engage, I won't feel worse right now. And right now, to the nervous system, is all that really matters.

The problem is that this calculation is deeply short-sighted. It optimises for the next ten minutes at the expense of the next ten months. And in doing so, it creates exactly the kind of slow-burning, compounding suffering it was trying to prevent.

Psychologists call this experiential avoidance — the tendency to avoid uncomfortable internal experiences (thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories) and the situations that trigger them. Research, particularly within a therapy model called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), consistently shows that experiential avoidance is one of the strongest predictors of anxiety, depression, and a general sense of being stuck.

Put simply: the more we avoid the things that feel hard, the harder everything gets.

The Irony Hiding in the Avoidance

Here is the part that tends to land like a small shock when people first really sit with it:

The pain of avoidance is almost always worse — and certainly longer — than the pain of the thing being avoided.

Think about the difficult conversation that lives rent-free in your head for weeks. The medical appointment that keeps getting postponed while anxiety quietly multiplies. The creative project you want to start but keep not starting because what if it fails. The apology you owe someone that stays stuck in your chest while the relationship slowly cools.

In each case, avoidance doesn't eliminate the discomfort. It stretches it. It turns a sharp, finite pain into a dull, chronic one. It takes something that might take an hour of courage and converts it into months of low-grade dread.

And here's the deeper irony: the anticipation — the imagining of how bad the thing will be — is almost always worse than the thing itself. This is so reliable in psychology that it has its own name: the impact bias — our tendency to overestimate how negatively future events will affect us, and how long that effect will last.

Alex's four-month avoidance of one conversation was not protecting anything. It was quietly dismantling something valuable, one unanswered text at a time.

What We Lose When We Keep Choosing Avoidance

Avoidance has a way of quietly shrinking your world.

It starts with one difficult conversation. Then it becomes easier to avoid the next one too. Then the difficult email. Then the risk that felt slightly too exposed. Then the relationship that required too much honesty. Then the version of yourself that wanted to try something new but the potential for failure felt too sharp.

None of this happens dramatically. It happens incrementally, in choices so small they barely feel like choices at all. And the result — years down the line — is a life that is safe and managed and carefully bounded, but somehow smaller than the one you actually wanted to live.

This is what avoidance costs. Not in one moment. In accumulated ones.

Alex had been paying this cost for a long time — not just with the friendship, but in patterns that ran quietly through work, through relationships, through the dreams that had been carefully practical-ized into something safer and more acceptable.

That parking lot moment from Post 2 hadn't just been about control. It had also, if Alex was honest, been about all the things that hadn't been said. All the conversations still waiting in the queue.

The Doorway Principle

There is a phrase worth tattooing somewhere visible:

The doorway to growth is almost always guarded by discomfort.

This isn't motivational poster language. It is a structural description of how change actually works.

Growth — real, lasting, meaningful growth — requires encountering something unfamiliar. And unfamiliar things trigger the brain's threat-detection system. Which means discomfort is not a signal that you're doing something wrong. It is often a signal that you are doing something important.

The question is not how to eliminate the discomfort of growth. It is how to build enough tolerance for it that you can move through the doorway anyway.

ACT therapy calls this psychological flexibility — the capacity to experience difficult thoughts and feelings without being controlled by them. To feel the anxiety of the hard conversation and have it anyway. To feel the vulnerability of the creative risk and take it anyway. To feel the grief of something lost and let yourself feel it rather than outrunning it.

This is not toughness. It is not suppression. It is something much more nuanced: the willingness to be uncomfortable in the service of something that matters.

What Helped Alex

The conversation with the friend happened on a Saturday morning. Coffee, a quiet space, and the opening line Alex had practiced approximately forty times:

"There's something that's been sitting with me for a while and I think I need to say it."

What followed was not a perfectly resolved Hallmark moment. There was some discomfort. A little defensiveness, briefly, on both sides. A moment where Alex genuinely wasn't sure how it would land.

And then — something shifted. The friend hadn't realised the impact of what had been said. They'd been carrying their own version of the awkwardness without knowing its source. The conversation, once opened, moved faster and more gently than four months of dread had suggested it would.

They ordered a second coffee. They talked about other things. The friendship, by the time Alex walked home, felt lighter than it had in months.

The thing Alex had been avoiding for four months took forty-five minutes to move through.

That ratio — four months of dread to forty-five minutes of courage — is one Alex did not forget quickly.

Practical Moves: Learning to Move Toward, Not Away

1. Name the Avoidance Without Judgment Before you can move toward something, you have to be honest that you're moving away from it. Keep a simple mental (or written) note of the things you keep not doing. No self-criticism — just awareness.

2. Ask: What Is This Avoidance Protecting? Underneath every avoidance is a fear. Naming it specifically — I'm afraid this conversation will end the friendship, I'm afraid the project will fail and that will mean something about me — takes some of its power away. Vague fear is harder to work with than named fear.

3. Shrink the First Step You don't have to have the whole difficult conversation in one go. You don't have to take the full risk immediately. What is the smallest possible first step toward the thing you're avoiding? Send the email without the perfect final paragraph. Make the appointment without deciding what you'll do after. Start the document with one paragraph.

4. Use the "Ten Minutes After" Thought When avoidance is particularly loud, try imagining yourself ten minutes after having done the thing. Not during — after. Most people find that image surprisingly manageable. It makes the mountain feel more like a hill.

5. Build an Evidence File Every time you do something you'd been avoiding and it turns out survivable — write it down. Over time, this becomes a personal archive of proof that discomfort is not dangerous. That you can do hard things. That the other side of the doorway exists.

The Bigger Picture

Avoidance shrinks life. Engagement — even imperfect, uncomfortable, slightly messy engagement — expands it.

Alex's friendship didn't just survive that Saturday morning conversation. It grew. Not because the conversation was perfect, but because it was real. Because two people chose honesty over comfort and discovered, as people usually do when they take that risk, that the relationship was more durable than the fear suggested.

That is the gift hiding inside every avoided thing: the evidence that you are more capable, and your relationships more resilient, than avoidance has been quietly insisting.

The doorway was always there. It just needed someone willing to walk toward it.

Where We're Going Next

In our final post, we bring Alex's journey to its most important destination — the distinction between fault and responsibility, and the strange, counterintuitive truth that a meaningful life may actually be more worth pursuing than a happy one.

It's the post that ties everything together. And it's where Alex's story lands somewhere that, hopefully, feels a little like home.

Nobody's Watching You As Closely As You Think (And That's Actually Great News)

2026-03-17T00:00:00Z

A Quick Recap

In our first post, we met Alex — someone doing all the right things on the outside while quietly wondering why life still felt so heavy. We explored why hard truths are difficult to absorb, and why growth starts not with positivity, but with honesty.

In our second post, we followed Alex into a rough Wednesday and unpacked the exhausting human habit of trying to control things that were never ours to control. We explored the Stoic dichotomy of control, the psychology of locus of control, and five practical ways to loosen the grip — not to give up, but to redirect energy toward what actually matters.

Today, we're moving into territory that is equal parts uncomfortable and deeply freeing — the quiet, persistent belief that everyone around us is watching, judging, and cataloguing our every move.

Spoiler: they're really not.

The Presentation

Three weeks after the parking lot, Alex had to give a presentation.

Not a huge one — a department update, maybe twenty people in the room, people Alex had worked alongside for years. By any reasonable measure, low stakes. But the night before, sleep was elusive. The morning of, the commute was consumed by a mental rehearsal reel: What if I lose my place? What if someone asks something I can't answer? What if my voice shakes? What if they all notice?

The presentation happened. There was a moment — about four minutes in — where Alex briefly lost the thread, stumbled over a sentence, and felt a hot flush of self-consciousness spread from chest to face.

And then it passed. The presentation continued. People nodded, asked reasonable questions, and dispersed back to their desks within minutes. One colleague stopped to say it was helpful. Another asked a follow-up by email that afternoon.

Nobody mentioned the stumble. Not one person.

That evening, Alex was still thinking about it.

The Spotlight Effect: When the Camera Is Only in Your Head

What Alex experienced that morning — and in the hours after — has a name in psychology. It's called the spotlight effect, and it describes our powerful tendency to overestimate how much other people notice and remember our actions, appearance, mistakes, and awkward moments.

The term was coined by psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky in a now-famous study from 2000. They asked participants to wear an embarrassing t-shirt — one featuring a large image of Barry Manilow — into a room of peers, then estimate how many people in the room had noticed the shirt. Participants consistently overestimated by nearly double. They felt like every eye in the room was on the shirt. In reality, most people were too absorbed in their own world to even register it.

The reason is straightforward: you are the central character of your own experience. You are always aware of yourself — your thoughts, your feelings, your stumbles, your choices. And because you are so aware of you, your brain naturally assumes everyone else is too.

They aren't.

Not because people are indifferent or unkind. But because they are equally busy being the central character of their own experience — managing their own anxieties, their own to-do lists, their own inner monologue about the thing they said last Tuesday that no one else remembers either.

The spotlight effect doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's fed by something deeper: the very human, very ancient need for social approval.

Humans are tribal creatures. For hundreds of thousands of years, belonging to a group was not a comfort — it was a survival requirement. Rejection from the tribe meant exposure, scarcity, danger. The brain learned, hard and fast, to monitor social standing obsessively.

That wiring hasn't gone anywhere. It just shows up differently now — not as fear of being left behind by the hunting party, but as fear of being judged in a meeting, or posting something online and watching anxiously for responses, or replaying a conversation on loop wondering if you said the wrong thing.

The brain doesn't clearly distinguish between social embarrassment and genuine threat. To the nervous system, a room full of people noticing your stumble can feel — physiologically — not entirely unlike danger. Heart rate rises. Attention narrows. The threat-detection system activates.

Which explains why Alex, after a presentation that went perfectly fine, still had the stumble on mental replay at 9pm.

What This Costs Us

When we live inside the spotlight effect unchecked, the cost is significant — not in dramatic ways, but in the quiet erosion of freedom.

We don't raise our hand in the meeting because what if we're wrong.
We don't start the creative project because what if people think it's bad.
We don't wear the thing we actually like because what if it draws attention.
We don't apologize because it would mean admitting we were wrong in front of people.

We edit ourselves — constantly, exhaustingly — for an audience that is, largely, not paying nearly as close attention as we fear.

Alex had been doing this for years. Not obviously. Not in ways that looked like fear from the outside. But there were things Alex hadn't tried, conversations that hadn't happened, versions of self that had stayed carefully tucked away — all because of an imagined audience that turned out to be far less attentive than believed.

The Liberating Truth

Here is the reframe that changes things:

The spotlight is mostly in your head. Which means you have far more freedom than you've been allowing yourself.

This isn't a call to recklessness or to stop caring about how you show up in the world. Caring about your impact on others is healthy and important. The distinction is between caring about how you treat people versus being paralyzed by what people think of you — two very different things that often get tangled together.

When you genuinely internalize that most people are too busy managing their own inner world to scrutinize yours as closely as you fear, something loosens. The imagined audience shrinks. The permission to try things, say things, be things — without a perfect performance — quietly expands.

This is not a one-time revelation. It's a practice. And like all practices, it builds slowly.

What Helped Alex

The week after the presentation, Alex did something small but deliberate.

When the mental replay started — the stumble, the flush, the what did they think loop — Alex tried something new. Instead of engaging with the replay or pushing it away, Alex simply asked: Is there any actual evidence that this mattered to anyone else the way it's mattering to me right now?

The honest answer, almost every time, was no.

Not because the stumble didn't happen. It did. But because there was zero evidence — no awkward silences, no changed behaviour from colleagues, no follow-up that suggested anyone had catalogued it the way Alex had.

That question — is there actual evidence? — is borrowed from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and it's one of the most useful tools available for interrupting the spotlight spiral. It doesn't dismiss your feelings. It just gently asks them to provide receipts.

They usually can't.

Practical Moves: Stepping Out of the Spotlight

1. Ask for Evidence When you catch yourself assuming people noticed or judged something, ask: What's my actual evidence for that? Most of the time, the spotlight is an assumption, not a fact.

2. Practice "Good Enough" Performances Deliberately do things imperfectly in low-stakes situations — contribute an unpolished thought in a casual meeting, send an email without agonising over every word. Notice that the world continues turning. The more you build evidence that imperfection is survivable, the less the spotlight threatens.

3. Redirect Attention Outward Much of the spotlight effect is fuelled by self-focused attention. When anxiety spikes in social situations, try genuinely focusing on the other person — what are they saying, what do they need, what's interesting about them? Curiosity about others is one of the fastest ways to quiet the internal critic.

4. Normalise the Stumble Every person in that room with Alex has stumbled mid-sentence. Every single one. Reminding yourself that your difficult moments are shared human experiences — not unique embarrassments — builds compassion for yourself and for others.

5. Delay the Replay If you find yourself replaying moments, try setting a specific "worry time" — fifteen minutes later in the day where you allow the replay, and then deliberately close it. This interrupts the loop without forcing suppression, which rarely works anyway.

What Freedom Actually Feels Like

Two days after Alex started using the evidence question, something small shifted in a team meeting. There was a moment where an idea surfaced — half-formed, not fully developed, the kind Alex would normally sit on until it was polished enough to seem safe.

This time, Alex said it out loud.

"I don't know if this is fully baked, but what if we tried—"

The response was immediate, engaged, and collaborative. Someone built on it. Someone else pushed back constructively. The conversation moved forward in a way it hadn't been moving before.

Afterward, Alex sat with a feeling that was hard to name at first. Light, maybe. Or just — less careful. Less performed.

That's what stepping out of the imagined spotlight feels like. Not bold. Not fearless. Just slightly more honest. Slightly more free.

And it turns out, that's more than enough to change a room.

Where We're Going Next

In the fourth post, we tackle one of the most counterintuitive truths in all of psychology: that the things we work hardest to avoid are often the very things keeping us most stuck. We'll explore why Alex's careful habit of sidestepping discomfort has been quietly costing more than it's saving — and what it looks like to start moving toward the things that feel hard, instead of away from them.

It's one of the most practically useful posts in the series. Don't miss it.

The Illusion of Control: Why Letting Go Isn't Giving Up

2026-03-16T00:00:00Z

A Quick Recap

In our first post, we met Alex — someone doing all the right things on paper, yet carrying a quiet, persistent sense that something wasn't quite working. We explored why hard truths are difficult for the human brain to absorb (spoiler: it's biology, not weakness), and introduced the idea that growth begins not with optimism, but with honesty. If you missed it, you can catch up [here].

Today, we're diving into the first — and arguably most universal — of the five struggles: our complicated, exhausting, deeply human relationship with control.

The Week Everything Felt Like It Was Falling Apart

Alex had a plan.

Not in a rigid, color-coded-spreadsheet kind of way — more in the quiet, unspoken way that most of us carry plans around without fully realizing it. A plan for how the week would go. How a difficult conversation with a colleague would unfold. How a family get-together would feel. How a particular project would land.

By Wednesday, none of it had gone according to that plan.

The colleague had reacted defensively. The family gathering had been tense in the way only family gatherings can be. The project had hit an unexpected snag. And Alex, sitting in a car in a parking lot at 6:15pm not quite ready to go inside, felt something that was part frustration, part helplessness, and part a quietly humiliating question:

Why does it feel like I'm always trying to hold water in my hands?

If you've ever sat in a metaphorical — or literal — parking lot feeling that way, this post is for you.

The Control Paradox

Here's the uncomfortable truth that psychology, Stoic philosophy, and pretty much every wisdom tradition on earth agrees on:

You control far less than you think. And the more tightly you grip, the more you suffer.

This is not a pessimistic statement. It is, actually, one of the most freeing things a person can internalize — once the initial sting of it passes.

The desire for control is deeply human. In fact, it's deeply biological. Our brains are prediction machines. They are constantly trying to model the future, anticipate outcomes, and reduce uncertainty — because for our ancestors, uncertainty often meant danger. A brain that could predict and control its environment was a brain that survived.

The problem is that we are now living extraordinarily complex lives — with complex relationships, complex organizations, complex social dynamics — and we're still running on that ancient software. The need to control kicks in not just when there's genuine danger, but whenever anything feels unpredictable. Which, in modern life, is almost constantly.

The result? Anxiety. Over-functioning. Micromanagement of self and others. Rumination. Attempts to script conversations in your head before they happen (we've all been there). A low-grade, persistent tension that never quite goes away because the world never quite cooperates.

What We're Actually Trying to Control

It helps to get specific, because "control" is a broad word that hides a lot of nuance.

When we dig into it, most of us aren't trying to control everything. We're trying to control specific things that feel connected to safety, love, or self-worth. Common ones include:

Other people's reactions — If I say the right thing, they won't be hurt/angry/disappointed.
Outcomes at work — If I work hard enough, the result will be what I need it to be.
How we're perceived — If I manage my image carefully enough, people will respect/like/value me.
Our own emotions — If I stay busy enough, I won't have to feel that.
The future — If I plan carefully enough, nothing will blindside me.

Notice what all of these have in common: they are all, to significant degrees, outside your control.

You can influence people's reactions — but not control them. You can do excellent work — but not guarantee outcomes. You can be thoughtful about how you show up — but not manage every perception. You can make plans — but life will revise them without asking permission.

This is not a reason to stop caring or stop trying. It's an invitation to get much clearer about the line between influence and control — and to invest your energy accordingly.

The Stoics Had a Word for This

The ancient Stoic philosophers — Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca — were remarkably practical people for their time. And they identified this exact human struggle more than two thousand years ago.

Epictetus, a former slave who became one of the most influential philosophers in history, framed it this way: there are things within our control (our own thoughts, intentions, responses, and choices) and things outside our control (everything else). He called this the dichotomy of control, and argued that nearly all human suffering comes from confusing the two categories.

Modern psychology arrived at the same place, just with different language. Psychologists call it locus of control — the degree to which you believe you have agency over what happens in your life. Research consistently shows that people with an internal locus of control (who focus on their own choices and responses) experience lower anxiety, higher resilience, and greater overall wellbeing than those with an external locus (who focus on what outside forces are doing to them).

Neither philosophy nor psychology is asking you to be passive. They're both asking you to be precise — to put your energy where it can actually do something.

What Helped Alex

Back in that parking lot, Alex didn't have a philosophy textbook. But Alex did have one habit that had been slowly developing over the past few months: the practice of asking a single, quiet question when things went sideways.

What part of this is actually mine to change?

Not: how do I fix this person? Not: how do I prevent this from ever happening again? Just: what's actually mine here?

That week, sitting with the frustration of a derailed plan, the honest answer was: the colleague's defensiveness wasn't mine to fix. The family tension had roots deeper than one gathering. The project snag was partly circumstance, partly a decision that could be revisited.

What was Alex's: the response to all of it. The next conversation. The choice to bring curiosity instead of more control. The decision to let Wednesday be a hard day without making it mean something catastrophic about the future.

Small shifts. But they changed the temperature of the whole evening.

Practical Moves: Working with the Control Instinct

If this resonates, here are a few evidence-backed ways to begin loosening the grip — gently, not recklessly.

1. The Two-Column Exercise Draw a line down the middle of a page. On the left: everything that's stressing you that you genuinely cannot control. On the right: everything you can influence or change. Most people are surprised to discover how much energy they're pouring into the left column.

2. Name the Fear Underneath Control is almost always protecting something. Before reacting from a place of over-control, ask: what am I actually afraid will happen if I let this go? Naming the fear takes away some of its power.

3. Shrink the Time Horizon When the urge to control the future spikes, gently bring your attention back to what you can do today. Not the next five years. Today.

4. Replace "I need this to go a certain way" with "I prefer this goes a certain way" Subtle, but meaningful. Preferences leave room for reality. Needs create collisions with it.

5. Mindfulness as a Daily Reset Even five minutes of mindful breathing — simply observing without trying to change — trains the nervous system to tolerate uncertainty. Over time, it genuinely shifts the baseline.

The Reframe That Changes Everything

Letting go of control is not the same as giving up. It is not passivity or indifference or resignation.

It is the deeply mature, deeply courageous act of directing your finite energy toward what you can actually affect — and extending genuine grace to everything else.

Alex left that parking lot without a fixed colleague, a resolved family tension, or a rescued project. But something smaller and more durable had shifted: the white-knuckle grip had loosened, just slightly. And in that space, there was room to breathe.

That room is where growth lives.

Where We're Going Next

As we continue the journey, we'll explore one of the most quietly liberating truths in psychology: the fact that almost no one is thinking about you the way you think they are — and why understanding the spotlight effect might just be the permission slip you've been waiting for.

Alex has a moment coming up that makes this one very personal. Stay tuned.

When Life Stops Making Sense: An Honest Conversation About the Things We All Struggle With

2026-03-15T00:00:00Z

There's a moment most of us have experienced — quietly, privately — where we sit with the uncomfortable feeling that no matter how hard we try, something isn't working.

Maybe it happens on a Tuesday evening, after a long day, staring at the ceiling while the rest of the world seems to hum along just fine. Maybe it creeps in during a commute, or surfaces at a party surrounded by people, or catches you off guard in the middle of an ordinary moment that suddenly feels anything but ordinary.

That was Alex.

Alex was, by most accounts, doing all the right things. Showed up to work. Kept commitments. Cared deeply — sometimes too deeply — about the people in their life. Exercised occasionally. Tried to be positive. Checked the boxes that society quietly suggested would lead to a life that felt... good.

And yet, somewhere around their late thirties, Alex started to notice a persistent, low-grade exhaustion that had nothing to do with sleep. A sense that they were pushing upstream on something they couldn't quite name. Conversations would loop. Old frustrations would resurface. Relationships that should have felt easy carried an invisible weight. And happiness — real, grounded, lasting happiness — felt like something that was always just around the next corner, always slightly out of reach.

Sound familiar?

If it does, you're in excellent company. Not because life is supposed to feel hard, but because most of us were handed a map that was missing a few crucial roads. We were taught what to pursue — success, approval, comfort, stability — but rarely taught how to relate to what happens when the pursuit gets complicated.

That gap is what this series is about.

What This Series Is

Over the next five posts, we're going to walk through five of the deepest, most universal struggles that human beings carry — the kind that show up in therapy offices, coaching sessions, philosophy books, and late-night conversations all over the world. These are not trendy self-help concepts or quick fixes. They are grounded in psychology, neuroscience, ancient wisdom traditions, and the very human pattern of repeating the same painful cycles until something finally shifts.

We'll follow Alex through each one — not because Alex's life is dramatic or exceptional, but because it's recognizable. The details will change, but the emotional terrain will likely feel like home.

Each post will explore one truth, why it's so difficult to accept, and — most importantly — what actually helps. Not toxic positivity. Not "just think good thoughts." Real, practical, compassionate strategies for growing through each struggle rather than simply enduring it.

Here's a preview of where we're headed:

Why your need for control is silently running (and sometimes ruining) your life — and what to do instead.
The liberating truth that almost no one is thinking about you the way you think they are.
Why the things you avoid are often the very things keeping you stuck.
The difference between fault and responsibility — and how that distinction changes everything.
Why chasing happiness might be the one thing standing between you and a truly meaningful life.

But before we get there, we need to start at the beginning. And the beginning is simpler — and harder — than most of us expect.

The Moment Something Shifts

Alex's shift didn't happen dramatically. There was no rock bottom, no crisis, no single event that cracked everything open. It was more like a quiet accumulation — a growing awareness that something needed to change, paired with an honest and uncomfortable admission: I don't actually know what that something is.

That admission, it turns out, is one of the most powerful things a person can do.

There's a concept in psychology called beginner's mind — borrowed from Zen Buddhism — which describes the ability to approach even familiar things as if seeing them for the first time, without assumptions or preconceived conclusions. It's the opposite of the defensive crouch most of us adopt when life gets uncomfortable. Instead of doubling down on the same strategies, beginner's mind says: what if I don't actually have this figured out?

For Alex, that question arrived on an ordinary Thursday. Not dramatically. Just honestly. And honestly is always enough to start.

Why We Struggle with Hard Truths

Before diving into the five specific struggles in this series, it's worth understanding why hard truths are hard — not just emotionally, but neurologically.

Our brains are, above all else, survival machines. They are wired to protect us from pain, conserve energy, seek familiarity, and avoid uncertainty. For our ancient ancestors, this was enormously useful. In the modern world, it often creates problems.

When a truth challenges the way we've been operating — even if that truth could genuinely help us — the brain often experiences it as a threat. And threatened brains resist. They rationalize, dismiss, delay, or simply go numb.

This is not a character flaw. It is biology.

Understanding this matters because it changes the frame. You are not failing when growth feels uncomfortable. You are not broken when old patterns resurface. You are human, working with a nervous system that was designed for a world very different from the one you're actually living in.

The work — the real work — is learning to gently, persistently, compassionately work with that system rather than against it.

A Growth Mindset Isn't Just Positivity — It's Honesty

One thing this series will not do is ask you to pretend things are fine when they aren't, or paint struggle as something that only happens to people who haven't "figured it out yet."

Growth mindset — the research-backed concept developed by psychologist Carol Dweck — is often misunderstood as relentless optimism. It isn't. At its core, it's a belief that where you are now is not where you have to stay. That abilities, perspectives, and emotional patterns can change — not easily, not overnight, but meaningfully, with awareness and effort.

That's a very different thing from forcing a smile.

Alex didn't need cheerfulness. Alex needed honesty, paired with direction. And that combination — truth told with warmth — is exactly what genuine growth feels like in practice.

An Invitation

If you've read this far, something in you is already leaning toward growth. Maybe you're in a season of questioning. Maybe you're supporting someone else who is. Maybe you're simply curious about why certain patterns keep showing up in your life no matter how much you try to change them.

Wherever you are, you're welcome here.

Over the coming posts, we'll move through the five truths together — carefully, honestly, and with the kind of practical grounding that makes insight actually usable in a real life, on a real Tuesday, in the middle of a real and beautifully messy human experience.

Alex's story is just beginning.

So is yours.

I started a company!

2026-03-13T00:00:00Z

"What? Huh? Why?"

Those are some of the many questions I was asking myself. Simply... Looking to challenge the brain in different ways than what I'm normally doing.

How it began - In my personal time while trying to secure my own personal hosted infrastructure, I was noticing that there wasn't an efficient or effective way to block bad threat actors (nasty hackers) on the Internet.

The typical (tedious) approach has always been:

I see a bad connection from IP1, therefore I must block IP1.
I see a bad connection from IP2, therefore I must block IP2.
I see a bad connection from IP3, therefore I must block IP3.
....
Repeat until you lose all sense of sanity.

The problem with this approach is that you end up getting stuck in a game of whack-a-mole. Who do you think wins? Trick question - it's not you!

I put a different idea together - what if bad threat actors run their hacking world like a business and focus on cost optimization and automation. Novel idea right?

How does this apply to what I do? Well if I were to run a business like theirs, I would figure out how to "copy/paste" my attacks in creative ways. To do this, I would choose a (cheap) hosting provider that has resources that I can use for my desired purposes. Once the hosting provider is identified, I'm going to figure out ways to spin up new resources in a quick manner in a different location (i.e. automation).

New Resource + New Location = New IP Address To Attack From

Now that I know this, let the hacking begin!

Do you see how the game of whack-a-mole starts?

What does my company do?

I have a few products available now, but the one product that solves the above problem is a product called Molasses Masses (external site).

How does it work?

Rather than blocking on a per-IP basis, I get all the subnets for that hosting provider that the hacker is using and then block those. The idea is that remote connections coming to my/your hosted services, should not come from other hosting providers. It should be from people like you reading this article!

Now it's possible that you or your business partners get caught up in the block list - no problem! You can exclude your own and/or business partner subnets from the specifically curated list of subnets that you download.

How effective it this?

I've seen a reduction of attacks of up to 90%* from all my honeypots on the Internet.

Why would you use this?

Got remote users that need to VPN into your organization?

Got hosted services that should be accessed from actual users, and not random bots sitting in hosted environments?

Then this is the product for you!

Integrations available?

Very simply, It's a flat text file of curated subnets that you can use in your own policies..

These are the supported platforms available today to consume my product:

Linux (shorewall)
Cisco - Firepower Threat Defense (FTD)
Fortinet - Fortigate Firewalls
Palo Alto Networks - PAN-OS and Prisma Access.

Curious to test it out? 7-day free trials available.

Use discount code MM2026 to snag a 20% discount on checkout for the first 50 customers :-)

* As with all things in life - your mileage may vary. You might have a different environment compared to mine which gives different results.

As I Improve the Relationship with Myself, the Quality of My Relationships Improve with Me

2026-01-22T00:00:00Z

There's a pattern that many of us experience but rarely pause to examine: the way we treat ourselves creates a template for how we allow others to treat us, and how we show up in every relationship we have. When we're harsh, critical, or neglectful toward ourselves, we unconsciously broadcast that as acceptable behavior. When we're kind, boundaried, and compassionate with ourselves, we naturally attract and cultivate relationships that mirror these qualities.

This isn't just spiritual philosophy—it's observable psychology. The relationship we have with ourselves forms the foundation for all our external relationships. When we practice self-compassion, we become better at handling conflict, more willing to apologize authentically, more capable of forgiving genuinely, and clearer in communicating our needs.

The Mirror Effect in Action

Think of your self-relationship as the original mirror in a hall of mirrors. Whatever you reflect inward gets amplified outward in dozens of interactions throughout your day. When you speak to yourself with contempt—"I'm so stupid," "I always mess things up," "I'm not good enough"—you're tuning your internal radio to a frequency of unworthiness. This frequency doesn't stay private. It broadcasts.

Here's what this looks like in real life: When you believe you're not worthy of respect, you might accept a friend consistently showing up late to your meetings without saying anything. You might tolerate a colleague taking credit for your ideas in meetings because some part of you agrees with the unspoken message that your contributions aren't valuable. You might stay quiet when a family member makes dismissive comments about your choices because you're already dismissing those choices internally.

Conversely, when you develop a genuinely loving relationship with yourself, the shift in your external relationships can be remarkable. You'll notice you set boundaries more easily, resolve conflicts more gracefully, and attract people who treat you with the same respect you've learned to give yourself.

The Ripple Effect: Observable Changes

When we improve our relationship with ourselves, specific, observable changes occur in how we interact with the world:

Boundary Setting: People who practice regular self-compassion find it easier to set and maintain healthy boundaries. They're able to say "no" to requests that deplete them without guilt spiraling for days afterward. This doesn't mean they become selfish—in fact, they often become more generous because their giving comes from overflow rather than depletion.

Conflict Resolution: Self-compassionate individuals navigate interpersonal conflicts with greater ease. Why? Because they're not defending against shame or trying to protect a fragile self-image. They can hear feedback, acknowledge mistakes, and work toward solutions without their entire identity feeling threatened.

Emotional Availability: When you're not constantly managing an inner critic or soothing wounds from self-directed cruelty, you have significantly more emotional bandwidth for others. People who treat themselves kindly show up as better listeners in their close relationships and are more present during important conversations.

Attraction of Healthier Relationships: Perhaps most significantly, as you improve your self-relationship, you naturally attract different people into your orbit. You'll find that drama-seeking individuals lose interest when you stop engaging in self-abandoning behaviors. Meanwhile, secure, emotionally mature people who previously seemed "out of your league" suddenly feel accessible because you're now resonating at a similar frequency of self-respect.

Visualizing the Transformation

Imagine your self-relationship as a garden. For years, perhaps you've neglected it—letting weeds of self-criticism grow wild, failing to water the flowers of your strengths, maybe even actively salting the earth with shame. The garden becomes barren, and you wonder why beautiful things don't grow there.

When you begin tending to this inner garden—pulling weeds gently, planting seeds of kindness, watering consistently with compassion—something remarkable happens. The garden doesn't just improve internally. It becomes a place others want to visit. Birds arrive (opportunities). Butterflies appear (joy). Other gardeners stop by to share seeds and techniques (authentic connection). The health of your inner garden literally determines the ecosystem of your outer life.

An alternate visual to explore: your self-relationship is like the foundation of a house. You can paint the exterior, rearrange the furniture, invite different guests over—but if the foundation is cracked and unstable, nothing else you do will create lasting security. When you repair and strengthen that foundation, everything built upon it becomes more stable, more beautiful, more sustainable.

Three Steps to Begin Improving Your Self-Relationship

Step 1: Notice Your Inner Dialogue (Week 1-2)

Before you can change how you speak to yourself, you need to become aware of what you're currently saying. For the next two weeks, simply notice your self-talk without trying to change it. Carry a small notebook or use your phone to jot down the harsh things you say to yourself throughout the day.

You might notice patterns: "I'm so stupid" appears when you make minor mistakes. "Nobody cares what I think" emerges in meetings. "I look terrible" shows up every morning. Don't judge these observations—just collect them like a researcher gathering data.

At the end of two weeks, review your notes. Would you speak to a good friend this way? A child? A stranger? This awareness alone begins the shift. Many people report that simply witnessing their self-talk reduces its frequency without any additional intervention.

Think of this step as turning on a light in a room you've been stumbling through in the dark. You're not trying to rearrange anything yet—you're just seeing what's actually there. The shadows that seemed threatening often become less frightening once you can see them clearly.

Step 2: Introduce the Self-Compassion Pause (Week 3-6)

Now that you're aware of your critical self-talk, begin inserting a compassion pause. When you notice harsh self-talk arising, try this simple practice:

Stop. Place your hand on your heart. This physical gesture activates the mammalian care-giving system in your body—the same neurological response that emerges when you comfort a loved one.
Acknowledge. "This is a moment of suffering" or "This is hard right now." You're not dramatizing or minimizing—just naming reality with clarity.
Offer kindness. "May I be kind to myself" or "What would I say to a friend right now?" Let the answer arise naturally without forcing it.

This might feel awkward at first, even ridiculous. That's normal. You're building a new neural pathway, and it takes time for it to feel natural. Commit to practicing this pause at least three times daily for four weeks.

Picture this practice like learning to play a new instrument. The first time you place your fingers on the keys or strings, it feels foreign and clumsy. But with repetition, muscle memory develops. Eventually, the movement becomes fluid, almost automatic and music appears. Self-compassion works the same way—awkward at first, natural with practice.

Step 3: Create Relationship Alignment (Week 7 onward)

As your self-relationship improves, your tolerance for misaligned relationships will naturally decrease. This is healthy, though it can feel uncomfortable. In this phase, begin actively aligning your external relationships with your improved internal relationship.

This might mean having a gentle conversation with a friend about their pattern of canceling plans last-minute. It might mean ending a romantic relationship that requires you to diminish yourself. It might mean speaking up in a family dynamic where you've historically stayed silent.

Create a simple practice: Each week, identify one relationship that feels misaligned with how you now treat yourself. Ask: "If I respected myself fully, what would need to change here?" Then take one small action toward that change.

This isn't about cutting people off or becoming rigid. It's about honoring the growth you've cultivated internally by allowing it to shape your external world. Many people find that the majority of their relationships actually improve during this phase because they're finally showing up authentically, which invites others to do the same.

Imagine you've been wearing shoes that are two sizes too small for years. You've adapted—walking differently, avoiding certain activities, accepting the discomfort as normal. When you finally get properly fitted shoes, walking feels strange at first. But soon you realize you can hike further, stand longer, move more freely. Aligning your relationships with your improved self-relationship is like finally wearing shoes that fit. The relief is profound, even if the adjustment takes time.

The Promise of This Work

Improving your relationship with yourself isn't selfish—it's the most generous thing you can do for the people in your life. When you stop abandoning yourself, you stop unconsciously asking others to fill that void. When you stop attacking yourself, you stop projecting that aggression outward. When you truly befriend yourself, you bring the gift of genuine presence to every interaction.

The quality of your relationships will improve because you're no longer seeking from others what only you can give yourself: unconditional acceptance, unwavering presence, and deep knowing of your own worth.

This is the journey. It begins within, and ripples endlessly outward. Each small act of self-kindness becomes a stone dropped into the pond of your life, creating circles that touch every shore, every relationship, every connection you have. The water remembers the kindness, and so will you.

The Clarity That Comes from Resting in Awareness

2026-01-17T00:00:00Z

Awareness brings clarity. When we rest in awareness—truly rest there, not just visit briefly—we begin to see more clearly. And here's the beautiful truth about this kind of seeing: we cannot unsee what we have witnessed in that light. Once awareness illuminates something for us, that insight becomes part of our inner landscape forever.

Think for a moment about something you're resisting right now. Perhaps it's a decision about your job—whether to stay in a role that feels comfortable but unfulfilling, or to leap toward something unknown. Maybe it's about your relationship, where you're wrestling with questions of compatibility, commitment, or whether it's time to move on. It could be about relocating to a new city, changing careers entirely, going back to school, having a difficult conversation you've been avoiding, or making a significant financial decision. Whatever it is, notice how that resistance feels in your body right now.

The Temporary Nature of Our Struggles

When we're navigating these big life decisions, there's often uncertainty that bubbles up from our past. Sometimes it's fear—fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of making the wrong choice, fear of disappointing others, or fear of losing what we already have. Other times it's old beliefs about ourselves that whisper limiting stories: "I'm not capable," "I don't deserve this," "People like me don't get to have that." It might be shame we're carrying from previous mistakes, grief from losses we haven't fully processed, or anxiety about repeating painful patterns we've experienced before.

Here's what happens with these feelings and thoughts: we perceive them to be permanent fixtures in our landscape. We believe this discomfort, this uncertainty, this stuck feeling is a space we'll inhabit forever. We think, "This is just how it is. This is who I am." And from that perspective, we struggle against ourselves, against our experience, against life itself.

But what we don't realize—what awareness can help us see—is that all of these things that seem to hold us back are actually temporary. They're passing weather patterns, not the climate of our lives. That discomfort you feel when uncertainty arises? Temporary. That tightness in your chest when you contemplate change? Temporary. The sleepless nights, the circular thinking, the heavy feeling in your stomach—all temporary.

The Gift Hidden in Discomfort

Sitting in discomfort and moving from one challenging moment to the next might seem like we're just enduring an endless series of difficulties. But something profound is happening in this process, whether we recognize it or not: we're learning more about ourselves. We're discovering our capacity, our resilience, our values. We're gaining wisdom from the very awareness we're cultivating.

Each time we meet discomfort with awareness rather than resistance, we're adding to an inner reservoir of knowledge about who we are and what we're capable of. We're learning what truly matters to us, what we can tolerate, what we need to change, and what we have the strength to transform.

Your Future Self as Your Guide

If you're facing the need to revisit a past trauma—whether to heal, to understand, or to move forward—it can seem incredibly scary. The thought of going back to something that brought so much pain, so much uncertainty, can feel overwhelming. You might believe you'll never get out from under it, that opening that door will consume you entirely.

But here's something that can help you navigate these difficult territories: the knowledge that your future self—the self that is alive and present right now, reading these words—was able to get through it. You made it. You navigated through that trauma, through that dark time, through that impossible situation, and you came out on the other end. You're here. That's proof of your capacity.

With this knowing, there's a space where we can visit the past and find clarity precisely because we've already survived it. You got through it before; you can get through revisiting it. The difference now is that you're not the same person who first experienced that pain. You're someone who has already proven they can survive it, integrate it, and continue living.

The Mountain Metaphor

It's almost like climbing a mountain. When you haven't hiked a particular mountain before, you don't know what to expect. The trail ahead seems uncertain, perhaps intimidating. You can't see around the bends, you don't know where the steep sections are, you're not sure how your body will respond to the altitude. You don't even know with certainty that you're going to make it to the top.

But once you reach the summit—once you move through the trauma, once you make the difficult decision, once you face what you've been avoiding—you can look back and see what you've accomplished. You can see the whole path you've traveled, the switchbacks you navigated, the places where you rested, the moments when you almost turned back but kept going.

And here's the powerful part: if you had to climb that mountain again, it might still be physically demanding. Your legs might still burn, your lungs might still work hard, you might still need to pace yourself. But now you have something invaluable—you have the best guide possible to get you up that mountain. That guide is yourself, your experience, your proven capability.

The Invitation of Awareness

This is the gift of resting in awareness. It allows us to see clearly—to recognize the temporary nature of our discomfort, to acknowledge our own resilience, to draw wisdom from our experiences, and to move forward with greater confidence in our capacity to handle whatever comes.

Awareness doesn't make the mountain disappear. It doesn't erase our past or eliminate future challenges. But it does illuminate the path, remind us of our strength, and help us see that we're far more capable than we often give ourselves credit for.

What becomes possible when we truly see this? What opens up when we recognize that we've already survived everything life has brought us so far, and that this awareness itself is a form of power we can draw upon?

The clarity is already there, waiting. We need only rest in awareness long enough to see it.

Apple Pay and TLS Decryption

2025-03-02T00:00:00Z

If you have had the challenge of getting Apple Pay to work when using TLS decryption, you'll more than likely find that it is a royal pain to figure out how it works.

The challenge with TLS decryption is when a TLS client (in this case Apple Pay) doesn't return any useful error messages to help pin-point what needs to be excluded from TLS decryption.

Some steps that I thought would help understand the TLS decryption process for Apple Pay:

Packet captures - too many to think of!
My network is IPv6 enabled, maybe the Apple Pay connection was happening over IPv6?
Downgrade TLSv1.3 to TLSv1.2 (in case there was encrypted SNI taking place)

This naturally took an age figure out and still I came up with nothing!

Given that my original troubleshooting was requiring me to find a valid amount to pay a merchant, I would typically go through these steps:

Begin with a mighty sense of determination to finally get this fixed.
Proceed to setup all the packet captures possible on the device performing the TLS decryption.
Attempt to make a payment through my iPhone.
Review packet captures until the 1's and 0's just became a garbled mess.
Resign to the fact that today was not the day I would fix it.

That is until I stumbled upon an interesting website called Apple Pay Demo - https://applepaydemo.apple.com/ (external site)

This allowed me simulate "fake payments" and more importantly, I could run this in Safari on a macbook as well as run packet captures on the endpoint to see what hosts it was talking to.

Low and behold, Apple Pay was communicating with this host smp-paymentservices.apple.com.

I created a TLS decryption exclusion and voila! It finally started working. If you need a list of hostnames that do not like TLS decryption, feel free to look at this post Crowdsourcing Pinned Certificate Information

Having said that, Apple makes it exceptionally difficult (!) to find the right content to troubleshoot any advanced issue. Please Apple, make our troubleshooting lives simple again!

Exploring the Syrup Shroud Project: Mapping IPs to BGP ASNs Made Easy

2024-12-02T00:00:00Z

In the interconnected world of the internet, understanding where traffic comes from is critical for security, analysis, and optimization. Whether you're sifting through server logs to find malicious connections or streamlining your network’s traffic management, identifying the sources of incoming IP addresses can be a game-changer. Enter the Syrup Shroud Project: a Python-based tool designed to map public IP addresses to their BGP Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) effortlessly.

This tool is a perfect companion for system administrators, network engineers, and cybersecurity professionals. Let's dive into what Syrup Shroud (external site) offers, how to use it, and why it could become your go-to tool for analyzing network logs.

What is Syrup Shroud?

Syrup Shroud simplifies the often tedious task of mapping IP addresses from log files to BGP ASNs. Using the RIPE API (external site), the script performs WHOIS lookups to retrieve information about ASNs associated with public IPs. The output can be summarized in a clean, easy-to-read table or exported to a JSON file for further automation.

Here’s a glimpse of what the script can generate:

+---------+---------------------------------------------------------+----------+---------------+-------------------------------------------------+
| BGP ASN | BGP Description                                         | IP Count | Total Entries | Sample IPs                                      |
+---------+---------------------------------------------------------+----------+---------------+-------------------------------------------------+
| 398324  | censys-arin-01                                          |        7 |            14 | 206.168.34.49, 162.142.125.210, 162.142.125.196 |
| 14061   | digitalocean-asn                                        |        5 |             5 | 146.190.41.214, 139.59.58.140, 159.203.44.105   |
| 8075    | microsoft-corp-msn-as-block                             |        4 |             6 | 20.118.68.252, 13.83.43.70, 4.151.218.179       |
| 398705  | censys-arin-02                                          |        3 |             5 | 167.94.145.31, 167.94.145.103, 167.94.146.56    |
+---------+---------------------------------------------------------+----------+---------------+-------------------------------------------------+

This table provides:

BGP ASN: The unique identifier for the ASN.
BGP Description: Details about the network operator.
IP Count: Unique IPs found in the log files.
Total Entries: Total occurrences of the ASN in the logs.
Sample IPs: Up to three example IP addresses from the logs.

Installation Made Easy

Getting started with Syrup Shroud is a breeze. Here's how:

$ git clone https://github.com/TheScriptGuy/syrup-shroud
$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

That’s it—you’re ready to analyze your logs!

Features That Shine

The Syrup Shroud script is packed with handy features:

Regular Expression Searching: Filter log entries matching specific patterns.
Column Separator Option: Easily locate the column containing IPs in your log format.
RIPE Database Integration: Minimize API queries by caching results.
JSON Output: Export data for seamless integration into automated workflows.

How It Works: Practical Examples

Here are a few scenarios where Syrup Shroud proves its worth.

Example 1: Basic Usage

Imagine you’re analyzing SSH connection attempts in a log file named server-log.2024-11-26. The log entries look like this:

Nov 26 00:00:15 server Connection from 218.92.0.172 port 39171 on 123.123.123.123 port 22 rdomain ""

To extract IP addresses matching Connection from.*port 22, use the script with a space (" ") as the separator and specify the column containing the IP address (7th column, zero-indexed):

(.venv) $ python3 main.py --separator " " --column 6 /syslog/server-log.2024-11-26 'Connection from.*port 22'

The output:

+---------+-------------------------+----------+---------------+--------------+
| BGP ASN | BGP Description         | IP Count | Total Entries | Sample IPs   |
+---------+-------------------------+----------+---------------+--------------+
| 4134    | chinanet-backbone no.31 |        1 |             1 | 218.92.0.172 |
+---------+-------------------------+----------+---------------+--------------+

Example 2: Leveraging the RIPE Database

To reduce API queries, use the --ripedb option to store and reuse results:

(.venv) $ python3 main.py --separator " " --column 6 --ripedb ripe.json /syslog/server-log.2024-11-26 'Connection from.*port 22'

The script will load cached data from ripe.json and update it with any new discoveries.

Example 3: JSON Output for Automation

Need the results in JSON format? Add the --json flag:

(.venv) $ python3 main.py --separator " " --column 6 --ripedb ripe.json --json output.json /syslog/server-log.2024-11-26 'Connection from.*port 22'

This produces:

{
    "4134_chinanet-backbone no.31": {
        "total_log_entries": 1,
        "ips": [
            "218.92.0.172"
        ]
    }
}

Visualization

You can of course generate a word cloud of the data too! The word cloud images below are based off a single day's worth of attempts to connect to my lab environment.

To show the Total Log Entries

(.venv) $ python3 generate_wordcloud.py -i output.json -o wordcloud-total_log_entries.png

(.venv) $ python3 generate_wordcloud.py -i output.json -o wordcloud-total_log_entries.png --metric ip_count

I hope you find this tool useful!

Side note - this is an extension of the Molasses-Masses project.

Connecting Through Rhetoric: Mastering Ethos, Pathos, and Logos in Everyday Communication

2024-09-13T00:00:00Z

In our daily interactions, whether we're aware of it or not, we're constantly using the art of persuasion. From convincing a friend to try a new restaurant to presenting a proposal at work, the ability to connect with others and make our point effectively is crucial. This is where Aristotle's timeless concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos come into play. By understanding and applying these rhetorical devices, we can significantly enhance our communication skills and forge stronger connections with those around us.

Decoding the Rhetorical Triangle

Before we dive into practical applications, let's briefly unpack these three pillars of persuasion:

Ethos: Appeals to the speaker's credibility or character.
Pathos: Appeals to emotions and values.
Logos: Appeals to logic and reason.

Now, let's explore how we can leverage each of these in our everyday conversations to create more meaningful and effective communication.

Ethos: Establishing Trust and Credibility

Ethos is all about building trust and establishing your credibility. In everyday situations, this doesn't mean boasting about your achievements. Instead, it's about demonstrating your reliability and authenticity.

Practical Tips for Employing Ethos:

Be consistent: Align your words with your actions. If you say you'll do something, follow through.
Show empathy: Demonstrate that you understand the other person's perspective. Use phrases like, "I understand where you're coming from…"
Admit when you're wrong: Owning up to mistakes shows integrity and builds trust.
Share relevant experiences: When appropriate, offer personal anecdotes that highlight your familiarity with the topic at hand.

For example, if a colleague says, "I'm not sure about this new project management software," you might respond with, "I had similar concerns when we implemented it in my previous role. Here's how we overcame those challenges…"

Pathos: Connecting Through Emotions

Pathos involves appealing to emotions and values. It's about creating a connection on a human level and showing that you care about the other person's feelings and experiences.

Practical Tips for Employing Pathos:

Active listening: Pay attention to emotional cues in the other person's speech and body language.
Use emotive language: Choose words that evoke feelings and paint vivid pictures.
Share stories: Personal narratives can create emotional resonance and make your point more memorable.
Show genuine interest: Ask thoughtful questions that demonstrate you care about the other person's perspective.

When someone says, "I'm feeling a lot of pain about this situation," acknowledge their emotions first: "I can see this is really hurting you. Let's talk through it together and see if we can find a way to alleviate some of that pain."

Logos: Appealing to Reason

Logos is about using logic, facts, and reason to make your point. While emotions are powerful, many people also need rational arguments to be fully convinced.

Practical Tips for Employing Logos:

Use data and statistics: When available, incorporate relevant facts to support your argument.
Provide clear examples: Illustrate your points with concrete, relatable examples.
Employ if-then statements: Show the logical progression of your argument.
Anticipate and address counterarguments: This demonstrates that you've thought through the issue thoroughly.

If someone says, "Paint me a picture of how this new process will improve our efficiency," respond with a logical breakdown: "If we implement this new system, we can reduce processing time by 30%. This means we'll be able to handle 50 more customer requests per day, leading to improved satisfaction rates and potentially increased revenue."

Balancing the Trio in Everyday Communication

The key to effective communication lies in balancing ethos, pathos, and logos. Different situations and individuals may require varying emphases on each element. Here's how to strike that balance:

Read your audience: Pay attention to how the other person communicates. Do they respond more to emotional appeals or hard facts?
Adapt your approach: Flex between the three elements based on the context and the person you're talking to.
Start with common ground: Begin by establishing a shared understanding or value (ethos), then move to the emotional aspect of the issue (pathos), before presenting your logical argument (logos).
Use transitional phrases: Bridge between different rhetorical appeals smoothly. For example, "Now that we've looked at the numbers, let's consider how this might affect our team's morale."
Practice active listening: When someone says, "What I'm hearing you say is…", they're likely trying to engage with your logos. Confirm or clarify your point, then consider if you need to supplement with pathos or ethos to strengthen your message.

Putting It All Together

Imagine you're trying to convince a friend to join a local volunteer group. Here's how you might use all three elements:

Ethos: "I've been volunteering with this group for a year now, and I've seen firsthand the difference we make."
Pathos: "The look of gratitude on people's faces when we serve them a warm meal is truly heartwarming. It's an incredible feeling to know you're making a real difference in someone's life."
Logos: "By dedicating just two hours a week, we manage to serve over 200 meals. That's 800 meals a month that wouldn't exist without volunteers like us."

Conclusion

Mastering the art of ethos, pathos, and logos in everyday communication isn't about manipulation; it's about connecting with others in a way that resonates deeply with them. By thoughtfully incorporating these rhetorical devices into our conversations, we can build stronger relationships, resolve conflicts more effectively, and create more persuasive arguments.

Remember, the goal is not to "win" conversations, but to foster understanding and create meaningful connections. As you practice balancing ethos, pathos, and logos in your daily interactions, you'll likely find that your communications become more impactful, your relationships more fulfilling, and your ability to navigate complex social situations greatly enhanced.

So the next time you're in a conversation, take a moment to consider: How can I establish my credibility, connect emotionally, and present a logical argument? With practice, this approach will become second nature, transforming the way you communicate and connect with others.

Blocking Hosting Providers

2024-09-12T00:00:00Z

One of the biggest challenges with having content that's accessible on the Internet is the ability for threat-actors to constantly access it.

More often than not, these threat-actors use various hosting providers to support their efforts. The problem is not necessarily with the hosting providers, but rather some of their customers.

In attempt to help minimize the noise that these threat-actors create, I created a project called Molasses-Masses. This project creates a daily and dynamically updated list of hosting provider subnets based off their BGP autonomous system numbers that are published to the Internet routing table. You can use these dynamically updated lists in your security policies.

Naturally, if you happen to have something hosted with these providers, make sure to whitelist them first.

This is primarily based off attacks I have noticed to my lab environment but I have a strong suspicion these threats might trying other destinations out there.

Today, this project is currently tracking 15686 IPv4 Subnets and 2495 IPv6 Subnets.

With all of these findings, I turned this into a product - Molasses Masses. You can view the product here on my website - broda.io (external site).

How often do we calibrate?

2024-05-20T00:00:00Z

How often do we take the time to calibrate ourselves? How often does society calibrate as a whole?

This is a seemingly simple question, right?

This question holds profound implications for both personal growth and societal progress.

Calibration, in this context, refers to the practice of self-reflection and reassessment of our goals, values, and actions.

For a visual example - just as sailors adjust their sails to navigate the waters effectively, we must periodically re-calibrate to ensure we are on the right path.

Exploring the idea of personal and societal calibration holds profound benefits for us as individuals and society as a whole.

Personal Calibration

Personal calibration involves the regular practice of self-reflection and goal reassessment. Without this practice, we may find ourselves adrift, losing sight of our true selves and aspirations. On the other hand, embracing personal calibration can lead to significant growth and clarity.

Negative Effects of Not Calibrating:

Stagnation: Without regular calibration, we can become trapped in routines that no longer serve us. This stagnation prevents growth and development, leaving us feeling stuck and unfulfilled. For example, someone might continue in a job that no longer excites them, missing opportunities for new challenges and advancements.
Disconnection: Our actions may start to diverge from our core values if we fail to reassess them regularly. This disconnection can lead to a sense of living inauthentically, causing internal conflict and dissatisfaction.
Burnout: Ignoring signs of fatigue or the need for change can lead to burnout. By not regularly calibrating, we might push ourselves too hard, missing crucial cues that it’s time to rest or alter our approach.

Positive Effects of Calibrating:

Growth: Regular calibration enables us to realign with our goals and values, fostering personal development. By periodically assessing where we stand, we can make informed decisions that propel or even catapult us forward.
Clarity: Through self-reflection, we gain a better understanding of our needs and desires. This clarity helps in making choices that align with our true and authentic selves, leading to a more fulfilling life.
Adaptability: Regular check-ins make us more adaptable to changes. Life is unpredictable, and being flexible allows us to navigate challenges and seize new opportunities effectively.

How to Personally Calibrate?

Finding the balance between neglect and over-management is key, and calibration serves as the metaphorical middle ground.

Consider the story of a gardener who never checks his plants. He plants seeds and walks away, expecting them to grow on their own. While some plants might thrive, many will wither and die. The garden becomes overrun with weeds, turning into a chaotic mess. This represents a lack of calibration, where neglect leads to deterioration and disorder.

Now, imagine a gardener who regularly tends to his plants, checking for weeds, watering when necessary, and adjusting to the changing seasons. This gardener’s plot flourishes, producing vibrant flowers and bountiful harvests. This illustrates the positive impact of regular calibration, where consistent care and adjustments lead to growth and prosperity.

Similarly, regular calibration in our personal and societal lives ensures that we are nurturing growth and addressing issues before they become insurmountable. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive, staying engaged with ourselves and the world around us. By calibrating regularly, we maintain alignment with our goals and values, fostering both personal fulfillment and societal progress. This balanced approach helps us navigate life’s challenges effectively, ensuring a thriving and harmonious existence.

Trying to figure out how to personally calibrate can seem like a daunting task, however there are some ways to figure it out.

Set Aside Time for Reflection: Regularly dedicate time to reflect on your goals, values, and actions. This could be through journaling, meditation, or simply a quiet moment of introspection.
Seek Feedback: Engage with trusted friends, family, or mentors to gain different perspectives on your actions and decisions. Constructive feedback can provide valuable insights for calibration.
Monitor Progress: Keep track of your progress towards your goals. Regularly reviewing your achievements and setbacks helps in understanding what works and what needs adjustment.
Stay Informed: Keep yourself updated with new information and trends in your areas of interest. This knowledge can help you make informed decisions and adapt to changes effectively.

Societal Calibration

Just as we ourselves need to calibrate, societies must also periodically reassess norms, policies, and cultural values. Without this collective introspection, societal progress can stall, and injustices may persist. However, when societies engage in regular calibration, they can foster equity, progress, and cohesion.

Negative Effects of Not Calibrating:

Injustice: When societies fail to reassess norms and policies, outdated systems can persist, perpetuating inequality and injustice. For instance, laws that once seemed fair might become oppressive as society evolves.
Stagnation: Just like individuals, societies can stagnate without regular calibration. Innovation and progress slow down, and the society may fall behind on global advancements in various fields.
Discontent: Social unrest can grow when people feel unheard and unrepresented. Neglecting societal calibration leads to a disconnect between the governing bodies and the public, fostering discontent and unrest.

Positive Effects of Calibrating:

Progress: Societal calibration allows for the identification and addressing of issues, paving the way for progress. By reassessing norms and policies, societies can adapt to new realities and foster innovation.
Equity: Regular calibration provides opportunities to correct injustices. Societies can implement changes that promote equality and fairness, ensuring that all members are treated with respect and dignity.
Cohesion: A society that regularly calibrates fosters a sense of unity and shared purpose. By addressing collective concerns and adapting to new challenges, societal cohesion is strengthened.

How do we as a society calibrate?

If you thought calibrating ourselves was daunting, then society? Oh my! Incremental changes are the best way forward!

Think of this situation where we start investing in our future society but doing the following:

Encourage Open Dialogue: Societal calibration requires open and honest conversations about current norms, policies, and values. Encourage dialogue at community, regional, and national levels.
Promote Inclusivity: Ensure that all voices, especially those from marginalized communities, are heard and considered in decision-making processes. Inclusivity leads to more equitable outcomes.
Regular Policy Reviews: Implement regular reviews of laws and policies to ensure they are still relevant and effective. This can prevent outdated systems from perpetuating injustice.
Foster Innovation: Support initiatives that encourage innovation and progress. This includes investing in education, research, and development to stay ahead in a rapidly changing world.

You made it this far! Now what?

Regular calibration, both personal and societal, is essential for growth, progress, and cohesion. By making a habit of reassessment and adjustment, we can navigate life’s challenges more effectively and ensure that we remain true to our goals, values and authentic selves.

Whether it’s through personal reflection or societal dialogue, the act of calibration is a proactive step towards a brighter, more fulfilling future. So, the next time you feel off-course, think about your sails and give them a tweak.

Your future self—and society—will thank you.

How Diverse Feedback Can Supercharge Your Ideas

2024-03-02T00:00:00Z

"Have you ever had that 'aha' moment, only to wonder if your brilliant idea was actually as good as you thought? I’ve been there too. It’s like, one minute you’re on top of the world, and the next, you’re doubting everything.

Here’s a little secret I’ve learned: the magic ingredient to transforming your ideas from good to great is not just any feedback, but a mosaic of opinions from a variety of people. Let’s dive into why your idea needs a party of perspectives to truly shine."

Why Diversity in Feedback Is Your Best Friend

"Imagine you’re cooking a new dish. You wouldn’t just stick to one spice, right? The same goes for your ideas.

Mixing in different viewpoints is like adding a dash of this and a pinch of that – it brings out the flavors you didn’t even know were missing.

It’s not just about making your idea ‘tastier’; it’s about making sure it appeals to more than just your taste buds.

The Art of Asking – Making It Work for You

"Seeking feedback can feel like walking into a party where you don’t know anyone – awkward.

But what if I told you it could be like catching up with old friends? It’s all about asking the right people the right things in the right way. And trust me, it’s not as daunting as it sounds."

Some Questions to Make Your Idea More Resilient

"Now, if you’re wondering, 'Okay, but what do I actually say?' fear not. Here are 9 questions that are like your conversation starters at the feedback party:

'What’s missing in my masterpiece?' – It’s about understanding the gaps you didn’t see.
'How would you add a splash of color to this?' – Encourages creative alternatives.
'What’s a different angle I could look at this from?' – Opens up new perspectives.
'If you had a magic wand, how would you tweak this?' – Invites imaginative improvements.
'Who else should be on the guest list for this idea party?' – Expands your feedback circle.
'In what ways could this idea be more accessible or inclusive to a broader audience?' – Aims to broaden the idea's appeal and reach.
'What are the immediate impressions or emotions this idea evokes in you?' – Gauges emotional impact and initial reactions.
'If we were to fast-forward five years, how do you see this idea evolving or impacting its intended audience?' – Encourages envisioning long-term potential and sustainability.
'Can you suggest any resources or references that could further refine or support this idea?' – Seeks actionable input for improvement and substantiation.

But what if I don't get the feedback I was looking for? Well that's the cool thing about you and your idea, you get to choose what it should encompass. At the very least you've recognized that a different audience is appropriate for your idea!

Take aways

So, what’s the takeaway from this?

Throwing a party for your idea, where you invite diverse perspectives, can be the secret sauce to making it unforgettable. It’s about embracing the feedback fiesta and seeing where it takes you.

Next time you have a lightbulb moment, remember to send out those invites far and wide. Who knows what amazing places your idea can go with a little help from your friends (and maybe a few strangers, too)?"

Side note...

"Got an idea you’ve been noodling on? I’d love to hear about it and maybe even be part of your feedback fiesta. Drop your thoughts on my LinkedIn post (external site) share how you’ve used diverse feedback to supercharge an idea. Let’s keep this conversation going!"

Homebrew and Decryption

2024-02-09T00:00:00Z

Being able to get Homebrew (external site) to work with a device that performs SSL decryption can be a challenge.

Example errors could look something like this:

$ brew update
fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/': SSL certificate problem: self signed certificate in certificate chain
Error: Fetching /opt/homebrew failed!
Failed to download https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula.jws.json!
Failed to download https://formulae.brew.sh/api/cask.jws.json!
Failed to download https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula_tap_migrations.jws.json!
Failed to download https://formulae.brew.sh/api/cask_tap_migrations.jws.json!

After doing some research, it seems that Homebrew is (under the hood) using curl to be able to get to the Internet. Here are some reference articles:

First step is to set the environment variable to tell curl where to find a custom configuration file:

export HOMEBREW_CURLRC=$HOME/.curlrc

Then in the .curlrc file, put the following flags:

--verbose

The advantage of the --verbose argument is that it shows where curl is is loading the certificates from. On my Macbook, running the brew update command yields an important line:

CAfile: /etc/ssl/cert.pem

Now we can append our enterprise Root Certificate Authority files to this /etc/ssl/cert.pem file. We are going to be adding the certificate contents that look like this (it's important to note that the file is in PEM format (base64):

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Now that we have the certificates added, we can run the brew command without any issues.

OpenBB Terminal and Decryption

2024-02-09T00:00:00Z

Running OpenBB Terminal on macOS? Struggling with SSL Certificate verify issues? It's possible that there is an upstream device that's performing some sort of SSL/TLS decryption (like a corporate decryption/security service?). Unfortunately there is not good error reporting on this:

There's a quick way to fix this. Once you get your certificates in base64 PEM format, you can append them to a specific file to be able to access it.

In macOS, this is the file stored here

/Applications/OpenBB Terminal/.OpenBB/certifi/cacert.pem

If you open up this file and add your corporate decryption certificates to it, it should fix the SSL Certificate Verify errors. The Root Certificate Authority contents for your Corporate/Enterprise security service should look like this:

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
<certificate data>
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Unfortunately, every time you upgrade the OpenBB Terminal software, you'll need to edit this file again and add the certificates.

Crowdsourcing Pinned Certificate Information

2024-02-07T00:00:00Z

Navigating the world of pinned certificates in a decryption policy is time consuming and painful to troubleshoot. The issue is also that a lot of people have already invested in some time to figure things out. With these isolated pockets of development it's hard to create a comprehensive list of host names that do not allow decryption to take place. This post is an extension on my previous one.

What is a pinned certificate?

A pinned certificate is where an application is expecting the presented certificate to come from a signed trusted authority. If the certificate is not presented from the correct authority, then a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack is potentially occurring and rather than keeping the secure connection alive, the connection terminates.

From an end-user experience point of view this is typically not ideal as the certificate error handling within an application does not display well (i.e. the application might not work at all or only parts of the application work.)

Making a better end-user experience.

To help "smooth" out the end-user experience when a decryption policy is applied, I created a Github repository (external site) to help crowdsource all the collective knowledge out there. The simple data structure of the pinned certificate hostnames allow a lot of people to contribute their individual findings and ultimately support a larger eco-system.

Data structure

data/
  -> category/
     -> application-name/
        -> hostnames
        -> header

How to interpret this data structure:

The data directory always remains constant.
Applications can be divided into categories. For example, Starbucks could be classified under retail.
Within each application-name directory are 2 files:
- hostnames lists all the hostnames that are using pinned certificates.
- header is a header file that contains a single line with the application name and the date it was last modified. Every time the hostnames file is updated, the last modified date needs to be updated.

Running the compile.py python script, it gathers the contents of all the header and hostnames files and outputs them into 2 separate files:

compiled_with_comments.txt - this file contains a list of hostnames with the hostnames that are gathered from the directory names as well as the header file.
compiled_without_comments.txt - this file contains an ordered list of hostnames only.
file-validation.hash - this file contains a SHA256 hash of the 2 files above.

In each of these 2 text files, a header is added to indicate when it was last updated.

Cloudflare hosting

These 3 files are hosted at these locations:

[compiled_with_comments.txt](https://files.nolanrumble.com/pinned-certificates/compiled-with-comments.txt)
[compiled_without_comments.txt](https://files.nolanrumble.com/pinned-certificates/compiled-without-comments.txt)
[file-validation.hash](https://files.nolanrumble.com/pinned-certificates/file-validation.hash)

Contributions

If you'd like to contribute to the content, feel free to submit a pull request with your findings. In your findings, please include the following information:

Vendor
Application Name
Application Category - ideally use one of the existing categories defined, but opent to creating a new one.
Public URL (if applicable) that mentions pinned certificate hostnames or wildcard domains.
(Optional/Preferred) Wireshark capture showing the TLS handshake failing and the Fatal error. Need to see the hostname being established in the handshake to make a correlation.

Questing for a Decryption Policy

2024-01-26T00:00:00Z

One of the many challenges with creating a decryption policy in an organization is the ability to be able to understand what types of traffic need to be decrypted and not decrypted. In my home lab, I've been playing around with enabling a TLS decryption policy and have come across some quirky things with my mobile devices where there are some pesky Pinned Certificates enabled within applications.

This is my attempt to try and make it easier to enable decryption. I am making the assumption that you have a working/functional PKI and the appropriate certificate authorities are deployed to your endpoints.

The logic should always be, start small and grow the policy from there. With this in mind, look at the following approach:

Disclaimer - this is a high-level approach and should not be assumed to be ok for all environments. Only you understand what's going on in your environment. Make sure whatever you do, it aligns with your needs and requirements.

Create a No Decryption Policy for the following categories - Government, Health, Shopping and Banking/Finance. This avoids us being exposed to sensitive data from our users (e.g. SSN's, HIPAA information, PCI data, etc)
If you have the capability to turn on a default "No Decrypt" rule which allows you to gain better visibility into the TLS traffic floating around your network, then start with this.
Identify a small subset of users who are ok with being the trailblazers and trendsetters and are willing to provide constructive feedback during this pilot phase. Enable decryption for them.
Monitor your device's logs for any decryption errors that are occurring. Investigate what the cause of the decryption errors and apply appropriate actions relative to your business needs.
Once there's a level of stability, expand the testing user group to include a broader audience.
Repeat steps 1-5 until you've covered your population.

In my lab, I came across 3 applications that did not like TLS decryption:

Starbucks App - the app fails to load the Starbucks locations on the map, due to Pinned Certificate requirements. The only way to make this work is to disable decryption for edge.openapi.starbucks.com.
Ventusky Weather App - the app fails to load any weather data. Disable decryption for these hostnames api.ventusky.com and data.ventusky.com.
Spotify App on laptop - Spotify seems to hate any sort of decryption, there is quite an extended list of items that need to have decryption disabled:
- apresolve.spotify.com
- login5.spotify.com
- guc3-spclient.spotify.com
- guc3-dealer.spotify.com
- spclient.wg.spotify.com
- api-partner.spotify.com
- audio4-ak-spotify-com.akamaized.net
- misc.spotifycdn.com
- seed-mix-image.spotifycdn.com
- wrapped-images.spotifycdn.com
- audio4-gm-fb.spotifycdn.com
- heads-fa.scdn.co
- misc.scdn.co
- audio4-fa.scdn.co
- i.scdn.co
- newjams-images.scdn.co
- dl.discordapp.net
Discord App - another culprit that hates decryption:
- dl.discordapp.net
- gateway.discord.gg
- status.discord.com
- cdn.discordapp.com
- latency.discord.media

Need a flat text file with all these hostnames? Grab it here (external site).

What is a Pinned Certificate?

To prevent Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, applications define exactly what certificates they expect to see during the TLS handshake. If something (like our decryption policy) presents another certificate, then the TLS handshake will fail to establish.

Advanced Wireshark Troubleshooting

I managed to create a filter that if you have a packet capture of historical events (or even capturing real-time), apply this filter to help figure out what what are pinned certificates:

tls.handshake.extension.type == 0 || tls.alert_message.level == 2

Simply put, the filter is only displaying the Client Hello portion of the handshake OR showing when the TLS alert message is a fatal (2). Given that packets are by default showing sequentially, it's easier to see which handshakes are failing due to Pinned Certificates and one can take corrective action.

Here's an example screenshot of how much easier it is to figure out how to do decryption:

Embracing Freedom: Understanding and Integrating Our Thoughts and Emotions

2024-01-23T00:00:00Z

Imagine standing on the shore of a vast ocean, watching the waves rise and fall. Just as the waves are not the ocean itself, our thoughts and emotions are not the entirety of who we are. They are mere expressions, ebbing and flowing through the larger seascape of our consciousness.

There is a liberating truth that we are the observers of our thoughts and emotions, not their prisoners. By learning to experience them from this vantage point, we open the door to a life of freedom and integration.

The Illusion of Identification

In our daily lives, it's easy to become entangled in a web of thoughts and emotions, mistaking them for our true selves. We often hear inner narratives like, "I'm angry" or "I'm worried," which can make these fleeting states feel like permanent residents in the house of our identity. However, just like actors on a stage, these emotional and mental states are temporary roles we play, not the essence of our being.

The Art of Observation

The practice of mindfulness teaches us to become observers. When we step back and watch our thoughts and emotions with curiosity, we learn they are like clouds passing in the sky of our awareness. This detachment doesn’t mean we become emotionless robots; rather, it allows us to experience our feelings fully without being overwhelmed by them. This perspective is akin to a skilled sailor who knows how to navigate the ever-changing seas without losing his direction.

Integration: The Path to Wholeness

Integration is about harmonizing the different aspects of our being. It's not about rejecting our thoughts and emotions but understanding their place in the larger tapestry of our self. By recognizing that we are the observer, we integrate these experiences in a way that enriches, rather than dictates, our life. This process is like a gardener who appreciates both the sunshine and the rain, understanding that both are essential for the garden’s growth.

Practical Steps to Embrace This Freedom

How do we practically apply this wisdom in our daily lives? Techniques like meditation and journaling can be powerful tools. They help us to slow down, reflect, and understand the transient nature of our thoughts and emotions. Imagine these practices as bridges, connecting the island of self-awareness to the mainland of daily experience.

By recognizing that we are the observers of our thoughts and emotions, we unlock a level of freedom and integration that transforms our entire existence. It's a journey of constant learning and adapting, but one that leads to a profound sense of peace and wholeness. Just like the ocean and its waves, our thoughts and emotions are part of us but do not define us. In this understanding lies our freedom.

Nolan Rumble: Blog

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What This Series Is

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Why We Struggle with Hard Truths

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An Invitation

I started a company!

What does my company do?

How does it work?

How effective it this?

Why would you use this?

Integrations available?

As I Improve the Relationship with Myself, the Quality of My Relationships Improve with Me

The Mirror Effect in Action

The Ripple Effect: Observable Changes

Visualizing the Transformation

Three Steps to Begin Improving Your Self-Relationship

Step 1: Notice Your Inner Dialogue (Week 1-2)

Step 2: Introduce the Self-Compassion Pause (Week 3-6)

Step 3: Create Relationship Alignment (Week 7 onward)

The Promise of This Work

The Clarity That Comes from Resting in Awareness

The Temporary Nature of Our Struggles

The Gift Hidden in Discomfort

Your Future Self as Your Guide

The Mountain Metaphor