What will you do to escape that noise? How will you deal with it? You can’t shut down the local construction, but you can blame it for your own lack of peace, for ruining your day. You can.

For most of us, control is the goal. But the fact is there’s only so much you can control. Every day there’s plenty of stuff that will bother you—if you let it. And that noise in your head will literally drive you to drink, if it hasn’t already.

But there are better ways to deal with it.

Frankly, I love the changing of the seasons. Variety is awesome. But back to the summer heat thing. I don’t like it mainly because it makes me feel uncomfortable. Cold weather also can, but I can bundle up and be fine. 

It’s the heat I don’t like. Some like it hot, but not me. 

I think it’s simply because I don’t like discomfort. And there are several things that make me feel the heat of discomfort. Embarrassment, humiliation, change, regret—these all make me uncomfortable.

Sometimes you don’t know why a person would do a thing until you’re there. At least, not until you find yourself in that particular situation, doing something similar.

Sometimes I really struggle with that question. I often wonder why I ever put that on my website. Control is the goal. It’s right there on the homepage. 

But here's the thing...

Nobody likes to do work where you can’t see the results. Where you never know if anything is being accomplished. It’s the recipe for burnout and exhaustion. That kind of work leaves us frustrated and unfulfilled.

Lessons two teachers learned from pausing alcohol. Long-form interview with Dave Stuart, JR.

I don’t know about you but I don’t wake up everyday feeling all pumped up and excited. Thanks to the fact I hit pause on alcohol I do wake up feeling good most days, which was a much-needed improvement. But excited?

At times we can get pretty down on ourselves and our progress. It can really help to stop and think of the things you truly value and want to be known for. A good starting point is to list what you value in others. Reason being, the things you most want to be true of you, you will see in those you truly respect and admire.

While discussing what I do in the realm of habits and addiction, I recently told a friend I’d give him $5000 to give up pizza. He said although he likes pizza, of course he would take it—”Pay me!”. Then I asked, if I offered him $10,000 to agree to never drink alcohol again in any form, would he take it?

...So how experimental are you? Willing to test your assumptions about your drinking?

Alcohol is good…at what it does.

I think all of us who drink can agree on one thing: we believe alcohol is good. Right? It is good. I want to go on the record and say that.

Now to be clear, we don’t all agree that drinking a lot of alcohol is good, or that drinking it every day is good. Some may, but not all of us. For the most part, all of us who drink believe it’s good on some level, or else we wouldn’t drink it.

You know, there are moments in time where something happens or you experience something that changes everything. Something that hits home in a way that just flips the script. Then suddenly you see things differently. 

I spent a number of years at New York City working with guys coming out of addiction, homelessness, and incarceration. One of my roles working at the Bowery Mission Residential Center was managing volunteers who wanted to mentor, tutor, or do whatever they could to contribute to the guys’ process of recovery.

The most frequent questions they asked were like, “What do I say to these guys?” or “What should I talk about?”.

It’s incredibly helpful to ask the question nobody wants to ask. Maybe it’s the question you’ve been wrestling with yourself.

In my last couple of newsletters I’ve offered something to answer the question, “Am I an alcoholic?”. If you haven’t signed up for that, do it. I don’t mind giving you a spoiler alert: You’re not an alcoholic. Nobody is.