Not because the framework is stupid — SMART goals work fine for quarterly targets and project timelines. But as a system for personal transformation, for becoming someone different, for actually executing the big ideas you’ve been sitting on? They quietly set you up to fail.

Here’s why.

SMART goals anchor everything to the outcome. Specific, measurable, time-bound — the whole structure points you toward a finish line and asks you to run toward it. Which sounds reasonable until you hit the first wall, which you will, and suddenly the question becomes: am I failing at the goal, or am I failing as a person?

That distinction collapses faster than you’d think.

When your identity gets wrapped around a destination, every detour feels like evidence that you don’t have what it takes. Every missed deadline isn’t a scheduling problem — it’s a character verdict. And the moment that happens, most people stop. Not because the goal was wrong, but because the framework made failure feel personal.

The goal isn’t the point. The person you become chasing it is.

This is the core shift that changes everything.

What if instead of orienting around what you want to achieve, you oriented around who you need to become to sustain it? Not the launch — the founder. Not the published book — the writer who shows up every day. Not the revenue number — the person with the discipline, the relationships, and the mindset to generate it.

That’s the PADE framework. Pick A Direction and Explore.

PADE sounds almost too simple. Choose a direction. Start moving. Stay curious about what you find. But underneath that simplicity is a fundamentally different relationship with progress.

Here’s how it works in practice.

Take a SMART goal: I want to build an online course that generates $25,000 a year by December.

A PADE thinker looks at that goal and asks different questions entirely:

What does the person who runs that business actually think about every day? What do they believe about their own expertise? How do they handle the week when nobody buys anything? What skills do they have that I don’t yet? What do they know about their audience that I’m still guessing at?

Now you have something to work with. Not a deadline — a description. Not a finish line — a direction. You start building toward that person instead of toward that number, and something strange happens: the number tends to follow anyway.

You can’t sprint to becoming someone. You can only grow into it.

There’s a practical reason this matters beyond motivation.

SMART goals create a binary. You hit it or you don’t. The year ends and you either made $25k or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, what do you do with that? Most people set the same goal again, or a slightly smaller one, or they abandon the category entirely and tell themselves it wasn’t for them.

PADE doesn’t have a binary. Because you’re asking ‘who am I becoming,’ there’s always a real answer. You’re always somewhere on the path. The question is never did you arrive — it’s are you still moving in the right direction.

That’s not a consolation prize. That’s a more accurate relationship with how change actually works.

Nobody becomes a great writer in a year. Nobody builds real expertise in a quarter. Nobody develops the emotional resilience, the professional relationships, the creative instincts of the person they want to be on a twelve-month timeline. That stuff compounds over years. And the only way to compound it is to stay in motion — which means you need a framework that rewards motion, not just arrival.

Here’s where to start.

Take the big thing you’re working toward — the business, the creative project, the career shift, whatever it is. Don’t write down the outcome you want. Instead write down this:

What kind of person sustains this five years from now? Describe them. How do they think? What have they learned? What do they believe about themselves and their work that they didn’t believe before?

That description is your direction. Not a deadline. A person.

Now ask: what’s one quality, skill, or belief on that list that I can start developing today? Not finish — start. Just one.

That’s your next step. Not the launch plan. Not the revenue model. Not the audience strategy. Just the one thing that moves you a degree closer to the person who can do all of that sustainably.

Pick a direction. Start moving. See what you find.

The goal will take care of itself.

Next in the Get Unstuck series: Write Your Eulogy Before You Die — the exercise that makes every other decision easier.

That One Friend · William Walker · Get Unstuck No. 3

This series is not a replacement for therapy. These tools work best alongside professional support.

Not occasionally. Not during finals week. Daily.

Sit with that number for a second before we move on, because I think most people read a statistic like that and let it pass through them. It’s too large to feel real. It sounds like a policy problem, something for administrators and legislators to sort out. But it isn’t abstract. It’s the person in the next seat in your lecture hall. It’s your roommate. It was me.

I was one of that 13% during college. And the reason I’m writing this isn’t to center my own experience — it’s because spending months inside that darkness, examining it from the inside out, taught me something that I haven’t seen named clearly anywhere else: what I was experiencing wasn’t just a mental health crisis. It was four distinct crises, hitting simultaneously, compounding each other in ways that made each one harder to escape.

Every Generation Thinks It’s the End

Before I name the four, I want to acknowledge something.

The instinct to declare our moment uniquely catastrophic is as old as civilization. Every generation has believed they were living through the end times. The anxiety you feel reading the news is real, but the sense that no previous generation could understand it — that’s not accurate, and it’s worth saying so before we go further.

What is different isn’t the level of suffering. It’s the specific architecture of it. The mechanisms. The four trends I’m about to describe aren’t timeless human struggles dressed in modern clothes. They are structurally new. And they are interacting with each other in a way that makes the sum significantly worse than the parts.

The Four Crises

1. Nihilism

This one starts early. You spend twelve years being told that if you study hard, go to a good college, and follow the steps, the life you were promised is waiting on the other side. Then you arrive. You do the work. You get the degree. And the life isn’t there.

What you find instead is debt, a brutal job market, and the slow realization that much of what you were taught was a sales pitch. The system has visible, documented flaws. The people running it are clearly imperfect. And when the framework you built your entire understanding of meaning around turns out to be cracked — meaning itself can collapse with it.

Nihilism isn’t laziness or ingratitude. It’s what happens when the story you were given about how life works stops matching the life you’re actually living. And it’s epidemic right now because the gap between the promised story and the reality has never been wider or more visible.

2. Comparison Culture

Social media didn’t invent comparison. But it industrialized it.

The specific brutality of the current version is algorithmic. You aren’t being shown a random cross-section of your peers. You are being shown the most aspirational, most engagement-worthy version of people living — in many cases — the exact life you told yourself you wanted. The algorithm knows your dream. And it serves it back to you on someone else’s face, daily, at scale.

Your highlight reel versus my behind-the-scenes reality. The math of that equation is impossible to win. And the insidious part is that it doesn’t feel like a rigged game — it feels like evidence. Evidence that you’re behind. That you’re not enough. That the gap between who you are and who you should be is both real and your fault.

3. Truth Disintegration

Here’s one that doesn’t get talked about the right way.

Social media created echo chambers — that part is widely understood. What’s less discussed is what echo chambers actually do to a person’s relationship with reality over time. When every thought, feeling, and perspective you have gets validated by an algorithm that rewards engagement over accuracy, you stop being a person in pursuit of truth and become a person in pursuit of confirmation.

Not every thought deserves validation. Not every feeling is a fact. Not every perspective is equally grounded in evidence. But the current media environment is architecturally incapable of making those distinctions, and so we’ve raised a generation — including myself — inside a system that never taught us how to be wrong.

4. Discernment Crisis

If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. If everyone is a thought leader, no one is.

We have never had access to more information, more perspectives, more voices, more frameworks. And we have never been worse equipped to filter them. The volume is so high that the ability to find signal in the noise — to know whose voice is worth following, which framework is actually useful, what information is trustworthy — has become a rare skill that no one taught us to develop.

This one hits hardest in moments of vulnerability. When you’re already struggling and you reach for something to hold onto, the noise doesn’t quiet down. It gets louder. More urgent. More polarized. And the inability to discern which voice to trust in that moment can make an already dark place feel completely disorienting.

What I Found

These four weren’t abstract research categories for me. They were what I found when I started examining the inside of my own experience during the period I was struggling most. And identifying them — naming them separately, understanding how they fed each other — was the beginning of something.

The framework I’ve been building since then starts with one principle that cuts across all four:

You cannot think your way out of a crisis that lives in your nervous system.

Nihilism, comparison, truth disintegration, discernment collapse — all four of them are, at their root, problems of signal. Your nervous system is flooded with noise and starved of the internal clarity that would help you navigate it. And no amount of better information, better content, better arguments, or better ideology solves that problem at the source.

What solves it — or at least begins to — is learning to regulate the internal environment first. Before the framework. Before the philosophy. Before the thought leadership.

That’s where we’re going in Part 2.

If any part of this landed for you, share it with someone who might need it. And if you’re in the middle of what I’m describing — the darkness, not just the ideas — please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. You don’t have to be at the edge to use it.

Next: The internal operating system — what I actually built, and how it works

You don’t see them often. But they show up at the worst times — right before you hit publish, right before you send the email, right before you say the thing out loud in the room. And the moment they appear, you stop.

You tell yourself you’re not ready. That now isn’t the right time. That people will think it’s stupid.

What you don’t realize is that none of those thoughts are about the thing in front of you. They’re about something that happened a long time ago. Something small. Something that shouldn’t still have this much power.

But it does.

The Boy With the Trains

Picture a seven year old who loves toy trains.

Not casually. Obsessively. Every birthday, every holiday, every spare wish — trains. The feel of the tracks, the weight of the engine, the way the whole system connected into something that actually worked.

And then his parents start responding.

You already have enough trains. You don’t need another one.

Why are you always playing with those things?

We’re not getting you another train.

From an adult perspective this is completely ordinary parenting. Managing a kid’s fixation. Keeping the toy budget in check. Nobody is being cruel here. Nobody is trying to cause damage.

But a seven year old doesn’t have adult perspective. A seven year old has feelings — and the feelings that start forming sound like this:

Nobody cares about what I love.

I can’t share the things that matter to me.

My interests make me a burden.

Those feelings don’t get processed and filed away. They get stored. And the mind, doing exactly what it’s designed to do, builds a protection system around them. A wall. A guard. Something that will fire automatically the next time it senses a similar threat.

The goal is simple: never feel that way again.

The Loop

Fast forward twenty years.

You’re sitting at your desk about to post your first YouTube video. You’ve recorded it three times. The lighting is fine. The audio is fine. The content is actually good. Your finger is hovering over publish.

And then the guard shows up.

Nobody is going to care about this.

You’re going to embarrass yourself.

Who do you think you are?

You feel it as present tense. As truth. As an accurate read on the situation in front of you. So you close the laptop. You tell yourself you’ll come back to it when it’s better. When you’re more ready. When the time is right.

What just happened wasn’t a rational assessment of your video. It was a protection mechanism built for a seven year old firing in the body of an adult. The loop ran exactly as designed.

The threat was detected. The old thought fired. You stayed safe. The loop reset.

And the worst part — it worked. You didn’t post. The discomfort passed. Your nervous system registered that as a win. Which means the next time you’re about to do something that feels like sharing yourself publicly, the loop will fire faster. With more confidence. Because it has evidence now that stopping you is the right move.

This is how one moment at age seven becomes a decade of almost.

The loop isn’t the enemy.

That’s the thing nobody tells you when they hand you the standard advice about pushing through fear and getting out of your comfort zone.

The loop isn’t broken. It isn’t a flaw in your character. It isn’t evidence that you’re weak or too sensitive or not cut out for this.

It was built to protect you. It did its job. For a long time, in ways you’ll never fully be able to trace, it probably kept you from a lot of pain.

The problem isn’t that the loop exists. The problem is that the loop doesn’t know how old you are now. It doesn’t know that the stakes have changed. It doesn’t know that the person in the room isn’t your parents managing a toy budget — it’s an audience that might actually want to hear what you have to say.

The loop kept you safe once. It doesn’t know time has passed.

What you do with it

You can’t think your way out of the loop. If that worked, you’d have done it already.

What works is something closer to what you’d do with a scared kid — because that’s essentially what you’re dealing with. You don’t argue with a scared kid. You don’t tell them their fear is irrational. You don’t push them out the door and tell them to toughen up.

You sit with them first.

When the thought fires — nobody is going to care about this — don’t fight it and don’t obey it. Instead try something that feels almost too simple:

Acknowledge it like it’s a person.

I hear you. I understand why you feel that way. What you’re trying to protect me from is real — or at least it was real once. And we’re doing it anyway.

That’s not toxic positivity. That’s not pretending the fear isn’t there. That’s recognizing the loop for what it is — a protection mechanism running outdated software — and choosing to act from your present self instead of your seven year old self.

You won’t get it right every time. The loop has years of momentum behind it. But every time you name it instead of obeying it, you’re rewriting a little bit of the code. Slowly the guard starts to trust that the world is different now. That sharing yourself doesn’t have to end the way it did with the trains.

That video you’ve been sitting on? The email you’ve been drafting for three weeks? The idea you keep saying you’ll share when you’re more ready?

The loop is going to fire when you try to send it. That’s not a sign something is wrong. That’s just the guard doing its job.

Name it. Thank it. Do it anyway.

I didn’t think much about it then. I do now.

Because what I was looking at wasn’t just poverty. It was a policy outcome. A series of decisions — about zoning, investment, infrastructure, grocery store placement — that left entire communities without consistent access to the thing most basic to human health: real food.

We have a name for this. Food deserts. And we tend to talk about them in the abstract, like a geography problem or a market inefficiency. But what that language hides is the human cost sitting underneath it. And few people bear that cost more heavily than pregnant women.

What We’re Actually Talking About

Here’s what the research tells us, stripped of the academic language:

Eating vegetables and fruits regularly has a measurable protective effect against chronic illness.

The problem is that for millions of women in the United States, “just eat better” is not advice they can act on — because the infrastructure to do so doesn’t exist where they live.

Approximately 30% of women of reproductive age in the U.S. are obese.

And while that statistic often gets weaponized into a conversation about personal responsibility, it doesn’t survive contact with the actual data.

When researchers look at why women in certain zip codes have worse health outcomes, the environment keeps showing up.

• Access to fresh produce.

• Proximity to fast food.

• Neighborhood walkability.

These aren’t individual failures. They’re systemic inputs.

And the stakes during pregnancy are uniquely high.

The Compounding Risk

Chronic conditions — diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease — that develop before or during pregnancy don’t stay contained. They ripple outward. Complications during delivery. Long-term effects on the mother’s health. Developmental impacts on the child. The medical literature is consistent on this.

In 2010, gestational diabetes occurred in roughly 44 out of every 1,000 live births. Pregnancy-related hypertension in another 43. These aren’t rare edge cases — they’re common, they’re serious, and they are more likely to develop in women who don’t have reliable access to nutritious food.

• One study that stands out: a randomized controlled trial where pregnant women diagnosed with gestational diabetes were split into two groups.

• One group received professional nutritional guidance.

The other was left to figure it out on their own.

The difference was significant — lower birth weight, lower total maternal weight gain in the intervention group. The researchers concluded that timely nutritional support during pregnancy meaningfully changes outcomes.

That’s the optimistic finding. Here’s the problem: what happens when the women who need that intervention the most live somewhere that makes following it nearly impossible?

The Geography of Harm

In a study conducted across Georgia, more than 58% of participants lived in food deserts — defined by limited access to affordable, nutritious food.

The majority of those deserts were in rural counties.

Urban food deserts are well-documented. And the disparities don’t stop at geography.

African-American women are 1.5 times more likely than their white counterparts to be hospitalized during pregnancy.

Women without insurance are two times more likely to face hospitalization than those with private coverage.

Younger women face higher rates of antenatal complications.

These numbers are not random. They follow the lines of systemic disinvestment almost exactly.

What This Is Really About

We tend to frame food access as a nutrition problem. Or a poverty problem. Both are true, but incomplete.

This is a policy problem. It’s about where grocery stores get built and where they don’t. Which neighborhoods get fresh produce and which get another dollar store. Who gets nutritional counseling and who gets left to figure it out. Who has transportation to access care and who doesn’t.

The system isn’t indifferent to these outcomes. It produced them. And the people who bear the weight of those outcomes — women, families, children born into circumstances they didn’t choose — are being asked to solve a structural problem with individual willpower.

That’s not a solution. That’s a deflection.

8:37 AM

The coffee machine sighs as I rush through the door.

I

             Am

                              Late

The waiting room was filled to the brim.

                                             A sea of Band-Aids and stuffed animals.

An orchestra of sniffles, coughs, and beeps from dying toys

Typically, I greet the families with a pasted-on smile.

                                   Today.

                                                 Time was a runaway train.

8:45 AM

Clifford’s voice blared through the television

Only by the rhythmic clack of the keyboard.

Another day, another relentless stream of children in need.

9:00 AM

Three patients down, seven to go. A young man with a sprained ankle, a child with an earache, an elderly woman with persistent back pain. 

She booked an appointment at the wrong location.

Frustrating. Did she not see the giant letters “Pediatrics” on the sign?

No Geriatric care.

Each case dealt with swiftly, prescriptions written, the next ushered in.

The clock ticks, the waiting room

                                 never

                                              seems to

                                                                         empty.

10:15 AM

The stomach starts to rumble.

Coffee was a distant memory, but I have time for a break.

“Next patient!” the nurse announces.

Never mind. There is no time now.

Another case of the sniffles, another quick diagnosis, another hurried goodbye.

Just a few more minutes until lunch… or hours since I am behind.

11:00 AM

Headache forming behind the eyes.

Fatigue creeps in, but the line keeps moving.

Is this really my passion?

A quick glance at the clock – fifteen minutes late for lunch.

Just gotta power through these last two...

11:15 AM

They walk in, unsteady and pale.

Their mother’s hand clutches theirs, her face etched with worry I hadn’t seen before.
Her trembling hand defied my practiced routine.

Briefly I scanned their symptoms – not your typical viral presentation.
My usual dismissal caught in my throat, replaced by a knot of unease.

I ignored it.

“Wait here,"

 I said, a forced calmness in my voice.

Research on the computer – blood test?

Time was money, and appointments were piling up.

11:17 AM

Already behind schedule.

                                                    Waste of my time.

“Next!”

The words felt hollow on my tongue.

“Antihistamines,“ 

I scribble on the notepad.

11:20 AM

Your name is called.

You stumble in, eyes glazed, body shaking.

A mother’s hand clutches yours, her face etched with worry.

A scene I have seen before.

Another sniffler. Barely even glance at their chart.

I just solved this one before. Quickly rattle off a diagnosis, shove a prescription pad across the desk.

“Take care of yourself."

Time is money, and appointments are piling up.

But the words died in my throat.

Your mother’s eyes, brimming with a fear I hadn’t witnessed before, pierced through my practiced routine. 

A tremor ran down my spine. 
The forced cheer in my voice felt like a lie.

Was it the desperation in her grip, the way you clung to her hand for dear life?

Shame

flushed

through

me.

The efficiency I worshiped, the conveyor belt of runny noses and scraped knees, suddenly felt monstrous.

 Had I become so focused on quotas that I missed something crucial?

The knot of unease in my stomach tightened.

Rushing you through was a mistake, a cold calculation that now left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Ignoring the line of patients, I reached for the phone.

“Get them prepped for an ambulance,“

stat!

I barked into the receiver. 
The urgency in my voice surprised even myself. 
This wasn’t just another case of sniffles.

This

             was

                         different.

And for the first time in a long time, a flicker of something other than weary efficiency burned in my eyes - a spark of determination.

The conveyor belt screeches to a halt.

11:33 AM
Sirens wail in the distance.

I wrote this thinking about the moment my own diagnosis was almost missed.
About how my doctor sent me away without thinking twice.
This isn’t an indictment of doctors. In fact, I wrote it trying to empathize with his situation

That same morning, the mutilated body of Annie Chapman was discovered in a Whitechapel doorway. Her throat had been severed. Her organs had been removed with surgical precision. It was the second such killing in ten days.

O’Connor made a decision that would change media forever: he would make this killer a character. He would give the faceless murderer a face—or at least, an identity that readers could obsess over. He would invent Jack the Ripper.

What happened next wasn’t just a murder investigation. It was the birth of true crime as entertainment, tabloid journalism as we know it, and a feedback loop between media coverage and real-world violence that we’re still trapped in today.

The Algorithm Before Algorithms

The Star launched in early 1888 with a radical premise: newspapers didn’t have to be written for the educated elite. O’Connor wanted to reach the newly literate working class—people who wanted sensation, not sophistication. He made the paper cheap, wrote in simple language, and filled it with stories designed to provoke emotional reactions.

Sound familiar? O’Connor was doing in 1888 what social media platforms do today: optimizing for engagement over accuracy, emotion over information.

When the Whitechapel murders began, The Star saw an opportunity. The first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, was killed on August 31st—a 43-year-old woman who had spent her final evening telling a friend she’d made “rent three times over, but spent all on drink instead.” She was found by a man walking to work, her skirt pulled above her waist, her throat cut so deeply the wound reached her vertebrae.

The Star didn’t just report this death. They produced it. They gave readers visceral details. They speculated wildly about the killer’s identity. They manufactured a villain.

Manufacturing a Monster

Here’s where it gets disturbing: The Star published a description of the killer that was completely fabricated. “There is a maniac haunting Whitechapel,” the paper declared, “his expression sinister, his face seems to be full of terror, his eyes small and glittering...”

O’Connor knew this description was fictional. No one had seen the killer’s face. But the article sold—it became the first newspaper edition in history to sell over one million copies.

The papers also latched onto a suspect the local prostitutes called “Leather Apron”—a man who ran an extortion racket in the area. Headlines screamed “The Only Name Linked With The Whitechapel Murders.” The actual suspect, John Pizer, had to flee to relatives’ homes to avoid being killed by the mob that formed.

He wasn’t the killer. The real murderer was watching all of this unfold. And he was taking notes.

The Feedback Loop

On September 29th, 1888, the killer did something unprecedented: he struck twice in one night. Elizabeth Stride was killed around 1:00 AM. Catherine Eddowes was found mutilated at 1:45 AM—meaning the killer had performed his ritual murder and escaped in approximately ten minutes.

Days later, a letter arrived at the Central News Office:

This is the letter that gave him his name. But look at what it reveals: the killer was reading the coverage. He was insulted that police had accused the wrong man. The false identification “gave him real fits.” Some historians believe this is what drove him to kill two women in one night—to prove the newspapers and police wrong.

The media had created a feedback loop: coverage that provoked violence that generated more coverage.

What We Learned (And What We Didn’t)

Dr. George Bagster Phillips, the coroner who examined Annie Chapman’s body, noted that all incisions were “cleanly cut,” suggesting someone with anatomical knowledge. The intestines had been “severed from all attachments” and placed deliberately on the victim’s shoulder. The uterus had been completely removed.

Modern criminal psychologists looking at these details see patterns we now recognize: the deliberate posing of bodies, the removal of “trophies,” the escalating violence, the need for recognition through letters. The killer likely had antisocial personality disorder—not psychosis, but a fundamental inability to see other people as fully human.

His choice of weapon tells us something too. A knife requires proximity. You have to watch your victim suffer. The Ripper didn’t just want these women dead—he wanted to experience their deaths, to see their identities literally erased as he mutilated their faces.

And then there’s the letter-writing. The taunting. The performance of it all. Jack the Ripper wasn’t just killing—he was content creating. He understood that his murders only achieved their full meaning when they were consumed by an audience.

The Algorithm’s Children

I’ve spent years studying how algorithms shape behavior—how platforms optimize for engagement in ways that can push vulnerable people toward increasingly extreme content. The Ripper case shows this isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s just faster now.

The Star didn’t have recommendation algorithms, but it had something just as powerful: a business model built on attention capture. Every decision O’Connor made—the fabricated descriptions, the sensational headlines, the speculation presented as fact—was optimized for engagement. Truth was secondary to virality.

Today, we see the same dynamics playing out with mass shooters who cite each other’s manifestos, with killers who livestream their violence, with extremists who are radicalized through recommendation pipelines. The platforms didn’t invent this. T.P. O’Connor did, 136 years ago in London.

But here’s what makes it worse now: the feedback loop is instantaneous. The Ripper had to wait days or weeks to see coverage of his crimes. Today’s killers get real-time engagement metrics. They can watch their manifestos spread. They can see the trend.

The Question That Haunts

Jack the Ripper killed five women over ten weeks, then stopped. We don’t know why. Maybe he died. Maybe he was institutionalized. Maybe he just... decided to stop.

But there’s another possibility that the historical record suggests: the coverage created him, and when the coverage changed, so did he. The Star’s approach was eventually criticized. Other papers questioned the sensationalism. The moral panic began to fade. And with it, perhaps, went whatever satisfaction the killer derived from his fame.

We’ll never know for certain. His identity remains unknown—the first and most famous unsolved serial killer case in modern history.

What we do know is this: T.P. O’Connor’s experiment worked. The Star became massively successful. “New Journalism”—what we’d now call tabloid media—became the dominant form of popular news. And the template was set: find tragedy, manufacture a villain, feed the public’s hunger for horror, and watch the engagement metrics climb.

Jack the Ripper was the first viral killer. He won’t be the last. The question is whether we can build media systems—whether algorithmic or editorial—that don’t require monsters to thrive.

I’m not optimistic. But I think understanding how we got here is the first step.

—

This piece is adapted from research I conducted as a student. The historical material comes primarily from Paul Begg’s Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History, contemporary police records, and the Casebook archive.

I got laid off in October. No fintech title on my resume. Financial services background—asset management, wealth advisory, a small estate planning startup.

By mid-November, I was in final rounds with a Series A CEO, had created a role at a company that didn’t have the position, and turned down a bank offer because I had options.

💡 THE CORE INSIGHT

“The best way to get jobs is to make them for yourself.” — Not entrepreneurship. Cold outbound. Diagnosing problems companies haven’t articulated yet.

The 4-Part Message Framework

Every cold message I sent followed this structure:

📏 KEEP IT UNDER 100 WORDS If they have to scroll, you’ve lost them.

Case Study: Trust & Will

Estate planning fintech → Applied + cold outreach → CEO interview in 10 days

What made the outreach work: I understood their space intimately—direct competitor to my last company. I didn’t just say “I applied.” I talked about their positioning challenge with financial advisors and offered perspective on their content gaps.

Result: Didn’t get the offer—they went another direction. But I went from cold application to CEO conversation in 10 days. The process proved the method works.

Case Study: RS Group

Industrial distribution → Cold outreach → Created a role that didn’t exist

The approach: Cold LinkedIn to their Head of US Distribution. Referenced their investor materials and RISE transformation program. Asked if they were thinking about integrating solutions strategy with the sales force.

They were.

What to Research Before You Reach Out

The Follow-Up Cadence

Most people send one message and quit. Every response from them restarts the follow-up countdown.

Here’s the rhythm that worked:

⚠️ THE KEY RULE

Each follow-up adds something new. An observation, a relevant article, their recent activity. Never just “checking in.”

What Didn’t Work

The Bottom Line

10 deeply researched cold messages

will open more doors than

100 generic applications

You don’t need the right title. You need to understand someone’s problem better than the other applicants—and prove it before they ask.

The research is the moat. Most people won’t do it.

📩 Want the full toolkit? I put together a prompt set for AI-assisted company research and interview prep—the exact workflow I used. Reply to this post or DM me and I’ll send it over.

• Not “how do you practice self-care?”

• Not “what makes you happy.”

But the actual, active demonstration of love—the same way you’d show up for someone you’re building a life with. And I watched something fall away.

Layers melting.

I realized I’d been treating self-love like a transaction.

Like a performance review.

I will receive love from myself if I have properly behaved.

Think about how absurd that sounds when you apply it to loving someone else:

• “I love you because you did your chores today.”

• “I love you because you checked off all the items on your task list.”

• “I love you because you listened.”

Those behaviors might express love.

They might be how love shows up in the physical world.

But they’re not the source of love.

They’re not the condition for it.

The Instinct Is The Evidence

Here’s what hit me standing there in the steam:

The fact that you even thought about meeting someone’s needs—that instinctual attempt to care—is already love.

The caring impulse itself is the evidence.

You don’t wait until every task is complete to declare that love exists.

Love exists in the attempt.

Love exists in the orientation toward someone’s well-being.

So why do we invert this for ourselves?

Why do we treat our own self-love like a conditional contract?

Like a receipt that only gets stamped after we’ve performed enough behaviors correctly?

What Marriage Taught Me About Self-Love

In marriage—or in any committed relationship—you don’t love someone because they completed specific tasks. You complete specific tasks because you love them. The behaviors are the expression, not the transaction.

I act as a person who loves my wife by showcasing specific behaviors after the fact.

Read that again.

The identity comes first.

The behaviors follow.

So what if I flipped the script on myself?

What if I started the day not trying to earn self-love through performance, but expressing self-love through my morning routine because I already love myself?

The Question That Changes Everything

So here’s what I’m sitting with:

What if self-love isn’t something you earn?

What if it’s something you express?

What if the morning routine isn’t a test you have to pass, but a letter you write to yourself—simply because you care?

Do you understand how that could work?

William is a content creator and writer exploring the intersection of personal development, financial wellness, and mental health. He writes about what he’s learning while building a life he doesn’t need to escape from.