For years I obsessed over habits. I wrote about getting yourself to do things when you didn’t feel like doing them, about the power of consistency, about flexing willpower. My whole focus was on bending myself into a pretzel to get things done, no matter how much friction there was.
At one point, I was pretty much a machine, executing on daily routines and tracking everything in a Google sheet. Every day was reading, meditation, deep work, cardio, weight lifting, journaling, and even a writing ritual. I did this for over six months without missing a single day.
I think it’s reasonable to say that I’ve done my fair share of grinding!
And I have to be honest, it worked. That discipline gave me freedom, options, and results. The grind mentality still has a place in my life.
But over time, my thinking began to shift. White-knuckling my way through life wasn’t the highest path. The deeper I went, the more I saw that sustainable, meaningful progress doesn’t come from brute force. It comes from alignment.
I now see grinding not as a virtue in itself, but as a tool. Useful, sometimes necessary, but only powerful when it’s serving a bigger vision.
What does it mean to be Aligned?
Being aligned means your actions, values, and desires all point in the same direction. It’s when your daily work feels congruent with who you are and who you want to become.
In alignment, you don’t have to constantly fight yourself. Energy flows naturally because the work itself feels meaningful. Obstacles feel like challenges you want to overcome, not burdens you resent.
An important caveat:- Alignment doesn’t make everything easy. It just ensures that the hard things you do actually matter to you, so they sustain you instead of draining you.
Why Not Just Grind it Out?
I know what it feels like to force my way through a role that’s out of alignment.
Not long ago I joined the leadership team at LevelUp, one of the companies I co-founded. At the time it felt like an exciting challenge. I’d get to wear a new hat, sit at the strategy table, and help shape the company’s future.
But it didn’t take long for the cracks to show. What the business really needed was someone who thrived on constant outreach - meeting people, networking, forming partnerships, running campaigns, and jumping on calls with clients across time zones.
The problem was, none of that matched who I am or what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to create, to strategize, to teach, to build things that help people grow. Instead, I found myself tied to a calendar of meetings, living out of sync with my sleep, my training, and my energy.
The misalignment was brutal. Even with all the productivity systems I’ve built over the years, I couldn’t fake my way into consistent motivation. I procrastinated. I resisted. I felt horrible most of the time. And when I asked myself why I was forcing it, I couldn’t come up with a good answer.
That’s one of the clearest signs you’re pushing in the wrong direction: when you can’t even justify to yourself why you’re doing it.
Eventually I decided to step away. The relief was instant. I promised myself I’d be more careful about what I commit to, because the cost of misalignment is simply too high.
And that’s the problem with trying to just grind it out...
Sheer willpower might carry you through a week, a month, even a year, but it’s not sustainable for a lifetime. Discipline can push you forward in the short term, but if the work is fundamentally misaligned, every step costs more energy than it gives back. Eventually you burn out, resent what you’ve built, or quietly quit on yourself.
Grinding without alignment isn’t commitment - it’s slow self-sabotage.
The Trap of Misincentives
Most of us struggle to find a clear vision or true north for our lives. What really matters to us? What do we value? What do we believe in? What do we actually want?
These are the deepest questions we can ask, yet they rarely take center stage. Instead, we get swept up in the busyness of living - earning money, running projects, paying bills, fixing the car, booking the next holiday.
Not only is it hard to find the time, but it's actually really difficult to specify what's important to us, what we value, thrive on, admire and believe in. These insights are hard to pin down and the process can be quite uncomfortable.
But here's the thing:- when we don’t define our own compass, the world happily supplies one for us.
We fall into validation traps, chasing what looks good to others instead of what feels true to us. Without clarity, we borrow someone else’s goals: “That guy has millions of followers, a Ferrari, and a crowd of admirers - maybe that’s what I should want too.”
With clarity and deliberation, you can consciously opt out of the fashion game so that you don’t feel the need to spend $500 on a handbag that cost $20 to make in China. But without pausing to examine whether you actually value materialism over other virtues, it becomes the default path. You play the game that everyone else plays, and when you do, people reward you with attention and approval. That validation feels good, so you chase more of it, and before long you’re trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle.
That's the trap of misincentives: they reward you for moving further out of alignment. On the surface, the signals look positive: more money, more status, more validation. The system tells you, “keep going, this is working.” But each step takes you deeper into a life you don’t actually want.
That’s why it’s so dangerous. It feels like progress, when really you’re just digging the hole deeper. You can end up climbing the wrong ladder brilliantly, only to discover at the top that it’s leaning against the wrong wall.
Peeling Back the Onion
David Deida, in The Way of the Superior Man, describes purpose and alignment as an onion. You don’t discover it once - you uncover it layer by layer.
As you grow, you will naturally feel the desire to outgrow your previous purpose. You have lived it, learned what you needed, and now something deeper calls you forward.
David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man
At first, the layers look vague. You might start with something broad like “I enjoy coding” or “I like fitness.” That surface clarity is useful, but it’s not the whole picture. As you lean into it, subtler truths emerge.
Maybe it’s not just coding, but “building products that make other people’s lives better.” Maybe it’s not just fitness, but “pushing myself to the edge and sharing that process to inspire others.”
Each time you live out a layer fully, another one reveals itself. You shed an old skin and discover a deeper, more authentic purpose waiting underneath.
Alignment, then, isn’t a single decision. It’s a practice of listening, noticing where energy flows naturally, and having the courage to evolve when the next layer appears. It’s an ongoing process that never ends.
Alignment and Grit = Direction and Endurance
I've come to think of it in these terms:- Alignment gives you direction. It ensures the path you’re on is worth walking. Grit gives you endurance. It gives you the resilience to push through the dips and obstacles along the way.
On their own, each falls short.
Alignment without grit collapses at the first sign of resistance. Grit without alignment just drives you deeper into the wrong life. Together they’re a superpower: the clarity to know where you’re going, and the toughness to actually get there.
On my own journey, I’m well-trained in discipline. I know how to fight resistance, form habits, and brute-force my way to results. But only recently - through journaling, reflecting on my mortality, and confronting the fact that I only get around 4,000 weeks on this planet - have I started paying closer attention to where I apply that effort.
When you zoom out to the scale of your finite weeks, hustle culture and misincentives lose their shine. What’s left is the only question that really matters: Am I aligned with this?
My recent experience with LevelUp was a painful one but the silver lining is that it served as a wakeup call.
I’ll continue to grind, but only where it matters.
I'm done with taking on stupid fights - from now on a fight really needs to be worthwhile for me to engage. Life's too short, time is too valuable and now I'm more cogniscent than ever about what matters to me.