The 3 Things I Am Thinking About — June 13th, 2026 Edition

Saturday again. This is the one I look forward to writing every week, because it is the one where I get to stop being tactical and just think out loud for a minute.

This week the three things all grew out of the same root. I have been reading Robert Greene’s Mastery, I have been chewing on a conversation about AI that genuinely unsettled me, and I have been doing the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding skills I thought I already had. Somewhere in the middle of all that, three thoughts kept tapping me on the shoulder. Here they are.

ONE: THE BORING MIDDLE IS WHERE EVERYTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENS

I have started to believe that almost everyone quits at roughly the same spot, and it is not the beginning and it is not the end. It is the middle. The boring middle. The long flat stretch where the beginner excitement has worn off, the finish line is nowhere in sight, and the work has stopped feeling like progress and started feeling like a job.

The beginning is easy to love. Everything is new, you improve fast, and the early wins feel enormous because you are starting from zero. The end is easy to love too, because you can see the payoff and the applause is close enough to hear. But the middle has neither of those things. The middle is just reps. It is showing up to do the same…