Apparently, AI still has a long way to go… Chris DiCaprio, everyone!
Aaaaand we’re back! No need to put me on a milk carton tomorrow morning… especially if I look like that.
Last Sunday was a much-needed break from the newsletter grind. Seventeen straight weeks of newsletter entries. Impressive? Sure. Exhausting? Absolutely.
At first, I considered throwing up a half-ass entry just to keep the streak alive. But then I remembered why I do this in the first place.
I do it to connect with you. It’s not about streaks, metrics, or even subscribers. Even as the numbers rise and fall, my love for creating stays the same. This newsletter isn’t about quantity, it’s about quality and the relationships I get to build with you every week. Never half-ass something you care about. Always use full-ass.
Which brings me to this week’s concept: sacrifice.
Quick sidebar before we dive in. I’ve been nominated to speak at SXSW 2026 (wild, right?). If you enjoy this newsletter and the way I break things down, I’d love your vote. I’ll drop the link at the end of today’s entry. But only vote if you enjoy the entry, deal?
Over the last couple of years, a lesson has been quietly brewing in the background of my life: you have to give something to get something.
It started as whispers in 2023, when I was running around LA trying to make it to every social event.
Run clubs? ✅
Group fitness classes? ✅
Happy hours? ✅
(We all know we shouldn’t burn the candle at both ends, but we do it anyway.)
Fast forward to March of this year. I’m sitting in a plastic surgeon’s office hearing the plan for a nerve transfer to restore motor function in my right foot after last year’s injury.
As she explains the process, she looks me in the eye and says, “For this particular procedure… you’re going to have to lose something to gain something.”
Context for our new readers: this surgery required me to sacrifice my ability to flex my big toe and have normal balance to gain the ability to raise my foot (dorsiflex).
I couldn’t believe my ears. Those whispers I’d been ignoring? They were now coming from a surgeon I’d just met — and I was about to trust her with a major operation.
How does she KNOW?
The universe has a funny way of humbling us. My oldest brother, Mike, once told me, “Life will nudge you, shove you, and then punch you if you ignore the first two warnings.”
And in that doctor’s office, I wasn’t getting nudged. I was catching a right hook from a prime Muhammad Ali. While recovering from surgery number four in seven months, I found myself thinking about all the situations where I overcommitted my time and energy. I was notorious for continuously thinking I could fit 36 hours of life into 24.
I started to accept that I had been stretching myself thin long before this injury. To the dismay of both of my parents, it was a key aspect of my personality that had been reinforced and conditioned into my DNA over two decades. For years, they had been telling me to slow down and get my rest, but I wanted to live fast.
“Living fast” may sound fun, but I’m here to tell you it’s unhealthy because it downplays the concept of sacrifice. A healthy life is a balanced life. The best way to strike that balance is knowing when to sacrifice the social want for the harmonial need.
A couple of weeks ago, I was faced with an oddly-timed, yet all-too-familiar situation. I had somewhere to be at 5p on a Friday in LA. For anyone who’s been here or lives here, you know you’d rather swim laps in Nickelodeon slime than deal with LA traffic on a Friday.
Trust me. This is the infinitely better alternative.
At 10a, I stared at my notebook. My daily to-do checklist had nine things on it. Nine.
Timeout for internal, F*ght Club-like narration.
2023 CE would’ve seen this as a challenge. My inner voice would’ve said something like, “I can definitely do all these things and still make it on time to my engagement.” The result? Nine things checked off a list with quarter- to half-assed effort, just to say I did them.
Luckily, 2025 CE sees the world a lot differently. I often joke with people that my nerve transfer and arterial graft were “software upgrades.” They allow me to say I’m “built different” as the kids would say.
Time in.
As a time-management exercise, I chose to pick three of the nine things that were the most important to accomplish in that 7 hours. Just because I was choosing a top three didn’t mean the others weren’t important, it just meant they wouldn’t get done that day.
After choosing the top three, I dedicated two hours to each of them. From 10a–4p, it was grind time. This would allow me to thoughtfully immerse myself in each one and still have time to travel an hour to my event. The math checked out, but would the process?
It worked. I got three high-impact, time-sensitive things done… at full-ass quality. The rest? I spread them across the weekend. No more rushing to do it all just to prove I could.
This newfound process has become something I’ve been using daily ever since. I’ve even given it a little name for stickiness and application in your everyday life. We’ll refer to it as the “P3” method.
• Pick: Decide what is/are the most important thing(s) for you to get done TODAY.
• Protect: Focus only on what you’ve chosen and fully immerse yourself in them.
• Push: Not doing something today doesn’t mean it’ll never get done. Reprioritize.
Pick. Protect. Push.
Sacrifice isn’t about loss. It’s about focus. It’s giving up the illusion of doing everything so you can do the right things with intention. The streaks, the social calendar, the endless to-do lists will always be there.
Real progress comes when you stop stretching yourself thin and start sacrificing with purpose. You’ve got to realize that just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you have to.
Hopefully you’ve learned something or at least laughed with me in this week’s entry! What’s something you’re going to “full-ass” this week? Let me know by either replying to this email or sending me a DM on LinkedIn or Instagram!
Thanks for another 7 minutes of your time! See y’all next Sunday. Have a great week 🏁
PS - If this week’s entry hit home, here’s one small sacrifice I’ll ask of you: click the link and vote for my SXSW 2026 session before Aug 24. It only takes 30 seconds, and it helps me get this message on a bigger stage. Here’s the link: https://participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sxsw26/community-voting-sxsw/page/community-voting/session/1750895941291001iNWu