I published 10 articles on Past Midway in 2025, each with core ideas highlighted in bold / italics text. This post is a year-end compilation of the 45 points that anchored those pieces.
Where to Cut Federal Spending – An Economic Plan for the U.S. – Part 3
- If we don’t cut enough now, it ALL gets cut later.
- Just because a line item on the Budget is categorized as “Mandatory” does not mean it can’t be reduced
- Parental Discipline is the optional and somewhat arbitrary assignment of a minimum negative outcome, created expressly to establish a causal relationship between a certain action/choice and an undesirable experience, such that it might dissuade similar behavior in the future.
- When the stakes are low, sometimes the natural consequences of a poor choice better inform our children than our words of warning.
- Some battles are worth fighting. Some are not.
- RULE: As a parent, never lose a battle you have chosen to fight when it comes to discipline. It will cost you and your child, repeatedly.
- COROLLARY: Do not choose battles that are not worth fighting.
- A direct, compounding effect of your children making good decisions is the freedom to make more of them in the future.
- Discipline is NOT punishment, and punishment is not good discipline.
- My overarching corporate philosophy boiled down to three statements:
- We hire adults and then treat them that way.
- We manage projects. We don’t manage people. We work with people.
- We work hard, but our personal lives and families always take priority.
- Spend time upfront defining the corporate culture you want and then build those fundamental values into your hiring processes and on-going management.
Conversations on Statistical Bias and Narrative Fallacies
- A telltale sign that we are deceiving ourselves and unaware of our own biases is the unwavering belief that we are right most of the time.
- People are wired to contrive stories from observation.
- The primary psychological reason we narrate is not to discover something new, but to fortify our previously held beliefs.
- Sometimes our greatest freedom lies in the humility of acknowledging how little we truly understand.
- Narratives simplify reality. For this reason, our narratives are NOT reality.
- The potential for wealth and power corrupts narratives in the marketplace of ideas.
- Tribalism and group-think are significantly amplified by the rise of social media, where we go to simultaneously indulge in our echo chambers and despise voices of opposition. If we are not careful, we might find we have grown to love those we do not know and to loathe those we love most.
- Repeating phrases we have heard elsewhere, verbatim, without our own independent study and thought, is a good indicator we have surrendered too much of our thinking to the influence of a tribal identity.
Authenticity and the Amortization of Love
- Love’s depth is forged in the quiet resolve to choose it, through the forced will of acting out love regardless of how we feel, even if the heart wavers.
- We each need to feel loved most when we are the most unlovely and unlovable, when we do not reciprocate love.
- Sustained love is reaffirmed through our actions across time.
Seven Principles for Building Wealth
- PRINCIPLE #1 – The further you get from the actual work, the more money you will make.
- PRINCIPLE #2 – The greater the duration in time between your thinking/planning/decisions and the outcomes, the more money you stand to make.
- PRINCIPLE #3 – The more you leverage skills, systems, assets, and capital to scale, the more money you will make.
- PRINCIPLE #4 – The greater your network and relationships, the more money you will make.
- The opportunity set in front of you is something like the size of your network squared. Opportunities = ~(Network)²
- PRINCIPLE #5 – The more asymmetric your bets, the more money you stand to make.
- PRINCIPLE #6 – The more you invest in yourself, the more money you will make.
- PRINCIPLE #7 – The quicker you put your money to work through ownership of appreciating assets, the more money you will make.
- The allure of financial wealth sometimes clouds a broader, more fulfilling life vision.
The Compound Interest of Character
- Thesis: Cumulative small choices compound to shape our larger life-options and ultimately our character.
- Truth: the direction of your life hinges on the summation of seemingly small, multiple-choice decisions.
- Reality: life’s pivotal moments are birthed from the small decisions you make in the seasons between pivot points.
- Character may be tested in major events, but it is built during the mundane details of everyday life.
- Discipline is the mechanism by which good intentions are transformed into enduring habits.
- Be sure to stimulate your life with new ideas and experiences such that you find your life-passions early. Expose yourself to new ideas, new places, new people. Travel. Read. Learn languages. Experience different cultures. Increase your radius of exploration beyond the familiar. Turn off the TV/computer/phone/tablet. Go. Read. Learn. Do… such that you may conjure up all your pre-wired greatness while you are still young.
- This habit of good small decisions to build character combined with greater exposure to new life experiences will bend your life-trajectory toward favorable future pivot points, and your peers will call you “lucky”.
- Being responsible is part of growing up. And growing up is partly about becoming more responsible. At least it should be, as a natural progression of maturing properly.
- Everyone gets older. Not everyone grows up.
- Sometimes people are more receptive to advice from strangers than to those closest to them.
- Sometimes it pays to take a risk in conversation.
- We are, after all, a large parade of people growing up together, for a short season.
- Sometimes we carry frameworks into adulthood with outdated assumptions that no longer serve us.
- Laughing at our younger selves provides clarity on how seriously we take things today that might one day look equally absurd. Unfortunately, clarity often arrives from a distanced perspective, and surfaces only as a whisper of wisdom, illuminating the assumptions from our youth that should have been provisional.
META SUMMARY
Much of life – whether in policy, parenting, culture, work, love, money, or character – comes down to understanding how small choices, unseen assumptions, and disciplined habits quietly compound over time to shape outcomes considerably more than we imagine.
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