Spend ten minutes on LinkedIn or entrepreneurial X and you’ll get hit with the same gospel on repeat. Founders bragging about 100-hour weeks. Someone sleeping under their desk like it’s a flex. People cutting off friends and skipping their kid’s birthday to close a round, and calling it dedication.

We’ve turned the normal life into something to be ashamed of. “Average” now reads like a diagnosis, and the only cure anyone’s selling is extreme, never-ending success.

But sit with hustle culture long enough and you start to notice something underneath it. A lot of what we call ambition isn’t ambition at all. It’s not love for the work, the product, or the people it serves.

It’s fear. Specifically, the fear of not mattering.

What counterfeit ambition actually is

Real ambition is expansive. It’s wanting to take something you can see in your head and build it out in the world.

Toxic ambition is the opposite. It’s a defense mechanism wearing ambition’s clothes.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the belief that who we are isn’t enough. You looked around, saw the world hand out applause for status and money and exceptionalism, and you made a quiet deal with yourself. Become the grinder. Hit the number, make the list, build the thing, and the gnawing feeling that you don’t measure up will finally go quiet.

Here’s the problem. When your business is carrying that weight, it stops being a way to create value. It becomes a way to feel okay about yourself.

And once your right to exist is tied to your output, failure isn’t a business outcome anymore. It’s a verdict on you. A flopped launch doesn’t land as “that idea missed.” It lands as “I’m worthless.” Then you finally win, and the win doesn’t feel like joy. It feels like relief. A short one.

The view from the top doesn’t fix the climb

We’ve been sold the idea that making it cures the ache. The real world keeps offering evidence to the contrary.

Take Markus “Notch” Persson, the man who built Minecraft. He sold Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. He bought a $70 million mansion in Beverly Hills, reportedly outbidding Jay-Z and Beyoncé for it. By every metric hustle culture worships, he won.

Then, in 2015, he started posting. The tweets were hard to read. He wrote that the problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying. He described partying with famous people in Ibiza, able to do whatever he wanted, and never feeling more isolated.

That’s the thing about using ambition as a shield. It protects you from feeling ordinary right up until you reach the top, and then it gets stripped away. You get the exact thing you chased, and you find out the applause doesn’t touch the empty part. The applause was never going to. It was a mirage the whole time.

Main character syndrome and the loneliness underneath it

We’re the first generation raised entirely inside an attention economy.

A hundred years ago you only had to matter in your town to feel like you mattered. Now you’re up against eight billion people on a screen that fits in your pocket. That math makes almost everyone feel small, and small is a terrible feeling to sit with. So we build a polished, hyper-successful version of ourselves to show the world. Psychologists have a name for the pressure behind it. The rest of us just feel it.

Part of that story is the belief that greatness has a cover charge, and the cover charge is everyone you love. We tell ourselves the real visionaries are ruthless and alone, that the marriage and the health and the friendships are acceptable losses on the way to the summit.

But trading the people who actually know you for the approval of strangers who don’t isn’t focus. It’s insecurity with a good PR team. Public approval works like sugar. Big spike, fast crash, and you’re hungrier than before the moment you put the phone down.

How to rewire it

If any of this is hitting close, the answer isn’t to torch your goals and go live in a monastery. Ambition isn’t the villain here. The fuel source is.

The shift you’re after is moving from fear-driven ambition to purpose-driven ambition. A few ways that actually starts:

Stop confusing your worth with your output. You’re not your revenue. You’re not your follower count. You’re a person who happens to build things, and you have humor and grit and curiosity and kindness that no quarterly report can touch. If the whole business vanished tomorrow, you’d still be worth exactly the same.

Look the fear of “average” dead in the eye. Ask yourself what’s so terrifying about a normal life. If you had enough money, people who loved you, and real peace, would that honestly be failure? When you name the boogeyman out loud, it gets a lot smaller. You can still go build the empire. Just build it because you want to, not because you’re running from the horror of being ordinary.

Do the inner work, not just more outer work. Grinding 14-hour days to outrun imposter syndrome is like outrunning your own shadow. High achievers are brilliant at conquering markets and clumsy at understanding themselves. Therapy, journaling, prayer, honest reflection, whatever gets you there. When you make peace with your flaws instead of trying to out-earn them, you end up with a quiet kind of confidence that no market crash can take.

Redefining the top

There’s a real power in building from a place of wholeness instead of lack.

When you already know you’re enough, you take smarter risks. You don’t blow up relationships to protect your ego. You hire people who are better than you, you sleep at night, and you lead your team like they’re human. You quit performing for strangers and start building things that actually mean something.

Don’t spend your whole life sprinting, only to reach the end and realize you climbed the wrong mountain. Greatness was never about how far you could get from your ordinary self. It’s having the nerve to accept exactly who you are, and to build your legacy from right there.

Information is cheap. Facts, statistics, frameworks, and quotes are everywhere—you can pull up endless data online in seconds. But here is the hard truth: information doesn’t change you, and it doesn’t make you smarter. It just clogs your brain with noise until you can no longer think straight.

Your brain does not magically upgrade raw data into understanding. After generating over $500 million in sales for brands like Shopify and Canva, I learned that the top 1% of high-achievers share a specific process for cutting through the noise. They do not just consume; they process. They understand that to think better than 99% of people, you have to think on paper.

To master this, you first need to understand the Cycle of Learning:

• Information: Raw data.

• Knowledge: Connecting facts and giving them context.

• Understanding: Taking a concept apart and rebuilding it.

• Intelligence: Your capacity to reason and problem-solve.

• Wisdom: Knowing what to do with what you know and applying it in real life.

Wisdom isn’t reserved for old age; it is achievable right now through application. When you interact with a piece of paper, you move from mere information to intelligence by externalizing your thoughts.

Here are the six principles of thinking on paper that will elevate your mind.

1. Acknowledge Your Brain’s 4-Thought Limit

Back in the 1950s, a famous study suggested our working memory could hold seven items at once. Modern research has corrected that: your brain can only juggle a maximum of four things at a time.

When you try to solve a complex problem in your head, your thoughts might feel brilliant, but your brain is essentially just highlighting the one sentence it can currently see. By writing, you externalize those four items onto the page, freeing up your working memory to process and reason further. The moment you write your thoughts down, you will spot the invisible holes in your logic.

The Fix: Next time you are stuck, grab a pen and externalize the variables your brain is juggling. The brilliant idea might collapse on paper, but that collapse is the thinking process.

2. Draw to Double Your Retention

A 2016 study on the “Drawing Effect” revealed that people who drew a simple picture of a concept recalled nearly double the information compared to those who just wrote the word down.

Drawing forces your brain to engage three types of processing simultaneously, creating a much richer memory trace:

The Fix: When learning a new framework, draw it out. Even if it is just circles, boxes, and arrows. For example, draw your business structure to see exactly where you are strong and where you are weak.

3. Use Handwriting to Force Friction

In 2014, the “Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard” study highlighted a fascinating phenomenon: typists produce way more words, but hand-writers learn more. Why? Because handwriting is slow.

If writing feels hard, it means your brain has stopped skating on the surface and started tunneling into meaning. Typing is too easy; you can transcribe verbatim without thinking. Handwriting creates a desirable difficulty. Because you physically cannot keep up with the speaker, you are forced to compress and process the information into your own words.

The Fix: Carry a physical notebook. Do not transcribe word-for-word. Force yourself to compress what you hear into core concepts.

4. Synthesize, Don’t Just Transcribe

Writing doesn’t help you learn just because you are taking notes; it helps because it forces a transformation of knowledge. Someone who rewrites a concept in their own words learns exponentially more than someone who simply records data.

This maps perfectly to Kolb’s Learning Cycle:

1. Concrete Experience: Living the moment (touching a hot stove).

2. Reflective Observation: Thinking about what happened.

3. Abstract Conceptualization: Connecting the dots (“Hot things burn”).

4. Active Experimentation: Testing the theory.

Writing fulfills the middle two steps, making it an act of application rather than documentation. This is why you forget most self-help books you read—you consume without synthesizing.

The Fix: After every learning session, write a one-page summary. Don’t just list facts; explain what you are going to do differently, and pick one concept to apply today.

5. Take Action to Generate Clarity

There is a field of study called distributed cognition, which proves that thinking doesn’t happen in the brain alone. It happens in a system that includes your environment, your tools, and the representations you create.

Writer’s block happens because you try to analyze before you act. But research into high-stakes professions (like crisis teams and air traffic controllers) shows that people act first, and understand their analysis retroactively. Writing generates clarity; you do not need clarity to start writing.

The Fix: Stop waiting for the perfect idea. If you need a great marketing hook, write 10 tragically terrible ones first. Let your brain react to the bad ideas on the page—that feedback loop will inevitably spawn the 11th, perfect idea.

6. Write Privately to Expose the Truth

We rarely question our own thoughts. If a thought is in our head, we assume it is true. Writing creates metacognition (the ability to think about your thinking) by putting cognitive distance between you and your ideas.

Furthermore, researcher James Pennebaker found that people who wrote privately about emotional or chaotic experiences for just 15 minutes a day showed improved immune function, clearer thinking, and better working memory.

If you only ever write polished content for public consumption or social media, your thinking will remain shallow. You are performing instead of processing.

The Fix: Start a daily writing practice that no one will ever see. Write for 10 minutes every morning about confusing situations, assumptions, or chaotic thoughts. Give yourself permission to be messy and contradict yourself. When you review it, you will expose your blind spots and uncover your best thinking.

Joanna Wiebe has a great breakdown on this:

Did you know there was a fascinating experiment done on weightlifters where they didn’t lift any weights for two weeks? Instead, they just sat there and visualized themselves lifting weights. The result is that they experienced a 13% increase in muscle mass. This isn’t magic—it’s neuroscience.

Most people have no idea how much potential is locked inside their own brains.

To unpack how to unlock this potential, entrepreneur Steven Bartlett sat down with Dr. Tara Swart, a neuroscientist, medical doctor, executive advisor, and best-selling author. Dr. Swart’s work confronts the unhelpful preconceptions we hold about human potential, specifically breaking down how the brain-body connection dictates our success, our health, and our resilience.

If you want to overcome your biggest challenges and build mental resilience, you need to understand the physiological truth of how your brain works. Here are the core insights from Dr. Swart on how to rewire your brain for success.

1. The Brain-Body Connection: Stop Treating Your Body Like a Vehicle

Early in her career, right around the financial crisis, Dr. Swart worked with high-performing executives who treated their bodies merely as vehicles designed to carry their brains from meeting to meeting. They were being paid for their cognitive abilities, yet they completely disrespected their physical health, creating the worst possible conditions for their brains to operate.

“This tiny organ, if it’s not in an environment that is giving it the best chance of doing its job, it’s not going to and a crack’s going to appear somewhere.” — Dr. Tara Swart

The basic foundations of high performance aren’t a secret: sleep, diet, hydration, movement, and stress management. When you ignore these, the cracks inevitably show up. For these executives, the cracks appeared when people literally started dropping dead on the trading floor from heart attacks induced purely by stress, not high cholesterol or smoking.

If you want your brain to perform at an elite level, you must first optimize the physical environment it lives in.

2. Cortisol and The “Contagion” of Stress

Stress is not just in your head; it is a physiological response driven by cortisol, your main stress hormone. In a normal 24-hour cycle, cortisol levels should fluctuate. When a challenge arises, cortisol spikes so we can adapt, but it must return to baseline.

When stress becomes chronic, your cortisol levels stay elevated. Your brain’s receptors interpret this as an imminent threat to your survival, triggering a cascade of hormones that cause severe inflammation throughout your body. As a survival mechanism, excess cortisol also causes your body to store stubborn fat around your abdomen.

Even wilder? Stress is contagious. Cortisol literally leaks out of our sweat and can travel roughly a foot around us, absorbing into the skin of the people nearby. As a leader, your stress levels significantly impact your team. You cannot simply “hide” your stress by suppressing your emotions; your physiology will still affect those around you.

How to combat high cortisol:

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  Aerobic Exercise: You can literally sweat excess cortisol out of your body.

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  Journaling or Speaking: Get the negative thoughts associated with your stress out of your brain-body system by writing them down or speaking to a trusted friend or therapist.

3. The Power of Neuroplasticity: You Are Not “Hardwired”

For decades, scientists believed that once you reached adulthood, your brain was physically set for the rest of your life. We now know this is entirely false. Through a process called neuroplasticity, your brain is actively growing and changing.

If you do nothing to challenge your brain between the ages of 25 and 65, it will plateau. However, if you engage in activities that are intense enough to force your brain to adapt, you can actively improve your executive functions.

When you learn a new language, pick up a musical instrument, or tackle a massive cognitive challenge, you don’t just learn a new skill—you improve your ability to regulate emotions, solve complex problems, think flexibly, and override unconscious biases.

The 4 Steps to Rewire Your Habits

If you want to use neuroplasticity to break stubborn habits (like procrastination, negative thinking, or picking the wrong partners), Dr. Swart outlines a specific process:

1. Raised Awareness: Identify the pattern that is holding you back. Spotting the pattern is 50% of the battle.

2. Focused Attention: Look at your past decisions and the consequences they created. Understand why you are making those choices (e.g., digging into underlying beliefs about self-worth).

3. Deliberate Practice: Actively look for scenarios to practice your new, desired behavior. At first, your brain will resist because it wants to use the old, energy-efficient pathway. But with repetition, the new pathway becomes stronger than the old one.

4. Accountability: Because this process is hard, most people quit at step three. You need an external force—a friend, a coach, or a visual action board—to hold you accountable.

4. The 8-Hour Brain Flush (The Glymphatic System)

If you think you can “get by” on 4 or 5 hours of sleep, you are actively destroying your brain’s ability to clean itself.

Between 2012 and 2014, scientists discovered the glymphatic system, an active waterway channel in the brain that flushes out toxins overnight. This system clears out the exact proteins (like amyloid plaques and tau proteins) that are linked to dementing diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

This active cleaning process takes 7 to 8 hours of actual sleep to complete. If you are constantly cutting your sleep short, your brain is accumulating toxins.

Pro-Tip: Dr. Swart notes that sleeping on your side is the optimal position for this overnight cleansing process.

5. The Truth About “Manifestation”

The word “manifestation” often gets a bad reputation as being “woo-woo” or overly mystical. However, Dr. Swart believes in manifestation based purely on cognitive science.

The brain is the source of your reality. You cannot simply “think” about becoming a millionaire and have the universe deliver it to you. True manifestation requires aligning your thoughts, your beliefs, and your actions.

For example, if you want to manifest an amazing partner, you must write down all the attributes you want in that person—and then ensure you actually represent those qualities yourself. Psychologically, you meet people at the level of psychological evolution you are currently at (or at the depth of your unhealed wounds).

If you want to jump-start your success right now, Dr. Swart offers a simple, 5-minute practice: Get very clear on what you want, visualize those things being true, and give gratitude for them. This simple act moves your brain from a state of fear to a state of trust, opening the gateway to making massive changes in your life.

What is one habit you want to rewire using neuroplasticity? Let us know in the comments below!

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Hustle culture teaches us to seize as much as we can and hold on to it tightly. We go through life plotting how to pull ourselves up the ladder, reaching for the next goal or big score, continually worrying that our carefully crafted plans will fall through and we’ll lose everything. 

The fear of ending up with nothing (rightfully) freaks us out. We toss and turn at 3 a.m. on a heap of twisted sheets, battling a delightful combination of rumination, intrusive thoughts, and (my personal favorite) catastrophic thinking. 

Early in my career, I spent a lot of time fretting about how much money was or wasn’t coming in. I was constantly stressed and regularly performed financial gymnastics in my bank accounts.

This struggle fueled my quest to not only make more money, but to be at peace with it. I envied anyone who managed to be calm when they spent money, and I aspired to embody that magical disposition.

Accepting Defeat

Once, while working as an art director for a publishing house, I told my coworker that I’d just lost a $500 deposit on a trip I could no longer take. Without missing a beat and with an edge to his voice, he remarked, “Well, that’s $500 you’ll never see again.” 

Oof. That stung. And while it felt true at the time—I’d definitely lost the money and was upset about it—I also couldn’t quite buy into the idea that, once spent, money is gone forever and can’t be found again. 

I didn’t envision it showing up in an obvious, literal way–like a check in my mailbox for exactly $500. But I still felt that somehow I’d reunite with it again, in an unexpected way. However, at the time, I pushed my unicorn-level optimism to the side, accepted defeat, and soldiered on.

I continued working hard and saving small amounts consistently. But I also dove into personal development and read every money management book I could get my hands on. And then one day, I finally realized something profoundly obvious: Money comes and goes.

Making the Mindset Shift

We’ve all heard this common adage, I know. But have you really heard this? And do you believe it? 

I was on the phone with my friend Tory, talking about the rough patch her business was going through, when she offhandedly said those exact words to me: “Money comes and goes.”

For some reason, the words finally landed. It all hit me like a truck—yes, money does come and go! There’s an ebb and flow simply because of its transactional nature. So why was I trying to micromanage it? 

I silently declared that the next time I had to dish out a chunk of change, I would have faith that it would be replenished, by hard work or otherwise. Of course, my declaration and new mindset has often been put to the test.

The Power of Acceptance

Last summer, I went to visit my friend Christa, who lives a couple hours outside of Toronto. Our first stop was a local honey store that only accepted cash. We’d both forgotten this detail, so we detoured to the only ATM in town. 

We chatted animatedly as we made our transactions, with me extra distracted by the high-tech nature of the ATM. Finally, we left in a flurry, beelining (pun absolutely intended) back to the honey store. After stocking up on goodies, I went up to the counter to pay. But as soon as I opened my wallet, a hot, burning feeling washed over me. There was no sign of the $200 I’d just withdrawn.

It only took a millisecond to realize what had happened: I’d left the cash at the ATM. Cue internal beratement and a carefully orchestrated “I’m not going to have a meltdown in public and further embarrass myself” moment.

We rushed back to the bank. But—no shocker here—the money was gone. I was officially out $200. That hot feeling washed over me again, but this time, I quickly course corrected: In that moment, I took a deep breath and consciously decided to stay calm. I was not going to let this little disaster ruin my day, let alone my entire trip.

I was pleasantly surprised at myself, noticing how I was choosing peace instead of spinning out. Who was this Yoda of a person? 

When we got back to Christa’s house, I called my bank to see if there was a way to rectify the situation. They created a case and said I’d be reimbursed if the claim was approved.

Choosing Flow over Fear

So, did I get the money back? I actually don’t know. I never checked. It’s not that I didn’t care or didn’t value the money. I did. And I do. At one point in my life, $200 was the difference between making rent and not. 

But believing the money was gone forever and I would always be $200 poorer is, well, limiting. That does not feel good or abundant. And knowing what it’s like to struggle with money, I’m definitely aiming for abundance.

If you’re shocked by my laissez-faire attitude, trust me, I’m even more so. In my twenties, I developed some awful “money avoider” habits. But after realizing my behavior was making my financial situation much, much worse, I spent decades consciously learning new, positive habits. 

I now spend consciously and routinely review my bank account and credit card statements. So why, in this instance, did I ignore the numbers?

I wasn’t avoiding the problem: I was choosing flow. I chose to believe more money was coming my way, no matter how much unexpectedly disappeared from my bank account that day.

Whether it’s factually true or not, I find it much more energizing to believe that money circulates in a loop of abundance and I can be part of that flow. I can let money go when desired and/or needed, and stay open to it finding its way back to me.

This new, healthier relationship with money is amplified when I remember to do three things:

1. Pause and take deep breaths before reacting;
2. Acknowledge and accept my emotions;
3. Choose thoughts that are supportive and expansive (even when I don’t want to).

Try this simple formula the next time you’re stressed about finances.

Yes, you can break the patterns that don’t serve you.

The results might surprise you: more peace, more calm, and an account balance that supports more sweet hauls.