Mark Koester

Palm Tree Party by Stellar Mammals: My Seventh Music Album Release

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A party record made from the Venice Canals. A house record made a few blocks from the Venice Beach. Golden hour. Browns and purples of the Santa Monica Mountains. And those blues turning orange of Pacific sparkling waves🌴🌊🏄.

“Palm Tree Party” is my seventh album as Stellar Mammals and my third with trumpeter Jacob Burgdorf. It’s also my first record with a dedicated vocalist, LosA, singing across seven of the twelve tracks. Twelve songs, thirty-eight minutes, somewhere between jazz house and deep house. Creation was a lot of fun and done mostly in an apartment overlooking the Venice Canals in Venice Beach, California.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music and all major streaming services. Everything in one place at StellarMammals.com/music.

Hope you enjoy!

Release Notes

Released on August 28, 2026. Written, composed, performed, produced and mixed by Stellar Mammals, aka Mark Koester Trumpet on all twelve tracks by Jacob Burgdorf Vocals by LosA Mastered with LANDR. Cover photo and design by Mark Koester: a soap bubble over the Venice canals, with the whole neighborhood upside down inside it. Stellar Mammals Production 2026.

I’ve long aimed to release on prime-numbered days. Admittedly, August 28 isn’t prime, but 28 is a perfect number, equal to the sum of its own divisors, which felt like a decent trade for an album that took a year for me to admit it was finished.

Palm Tree Party Music Videos:

▶️ Watch the Palm Tree Party playlist on YouTube

In Too Deep — lyric video
Frisbee Flow State — official music video
Anywhere We Go — lyric video, out August 30
More to come: Last Breath House, Echoes of a Life That Could Have Been

Every video lives in the Stellar Mammals — Music Videos playlist. Find more art, music and videos at StellarMammals.com, and day-to-day on Instagram.

Track List

Anywhere We Go
In Too Deep
Truth be Told
Frisbee Flow State
Beethoven at the Beach House
Catalina Island
Eagle Eat Eagle World
I Want It All
Joyous
Marimba on Mars
Echoes of a Life That Could Have Been
Last Breath House

Singles: Frisbee Flow State (August 5) and In Too Deep (August 19).

Liner Notes from LosA

LosA wrote and sings the lyrics on seven of the twelve tracks. Here is where each one came from, in her words.

Anywhere We Go - The original song was called “Jolly Toad,” so that gave me the imagery of mud, wandering a swampy forest with lilypads, and being lost in an Alice in Wonderland type of situation.
In Too Deep - A more light-hearted dance tune about letting go and dancing! Interpreting a scenario where a relationship is fading away, but the music and environment make you want to try one more time, so “take my hand and dance,” and that you want to feel something again.
Frisbee Flow State - Frisbee flow state!!
Beethoven at the Beach House - Written with the imagery of a stormy night at a beach house party, taking a step away, looking at the moon and thinking about someone who isn’t there!
I Want It All - The original title was “Oregon Orford Coast,” so I imagined a foggy, cold coastline, and watching the crashing waves below, realizing that you have to be at peace with yourself to move forward, and to get what you want!
Joyous - Do you rememberrrrrr?!?!?
Echoes of a Life That Could Have Been - Coming to terms with your fate.

LosA

Collaborators / Attribution

Collaboration is a gift. Thanks to:

Jacob Burgdorf - trumpet and horn on all twelve tracks; co-writer on the record. Added bass, keys and other notes on multiple tracks. LA-based, Midwest-born. Find on Instagram
LosA - lead vocals and lyrics on seven tracks, ukulele on Frisbee Flow State, marimba on Marimba on Mars, plus the field recording that gives Beethoven at the Beach House an actual party in the background. Find on Instagram and checkout her videos on YouTube.
Sky Bartlett - bass on Anywhere We Go and Last Breath House. Find on Instagram
Kris Cruz - early composition and production on In Too Deep and production help on Frisbee Flow State. LA-based producer and audio engineer. Find on Instagram

Artist and Producer Notes from Stellar Mammals / Mark Koester

About the Album

I’ve been making house tracks for several years, mostly as a way to experiment and have fun. Something to mess with over time. Intuitive and unintentional. I vaguely carried some notion of eventually doing a house album though I never expected or planned for this particular record.

What I did have was a pull that was hard to ignore: putting Jacob’s trumpet somewhere it hadn’t been yet. We’d made two albums together in the lofi and instrumental space, and his horn kept hinting at something else, something with more a four on the floor dance groove under it: House and Horns.

While unplanned, this album is also a deliberate turn. Six albums of instrumental music made mostly for focus and flow, and this time I wanted something you could move to, bop your head and dance.

By the fall of 2025, after finishing and releasing an album in the summer, the thing had a name and a shape. I went back through years of demos and found I’d been quietly making this record for a while already: a sketch from 2021, another started on my iPhone, a mid 2024 track, one written after a run on the Oregon coast. From there, I started building forward from that pile instead of from scratch.

Then LosA showed up and the album stopped being what we’d planned and became what it needed to be. House music needs a voice and she became ours. She’s the first dedicated vocalist I’ve worked with across a whole record, and putting a voice on seven of twelve tracks changed everything downstream: the arrangements, the space I had to leave, the mix, and even what the songs were about. The beats I’d written as instrumentals became actual songs.

Ironically, this album “Palm Tree Party” is named after a song that got cut but whose title was too good to leave behind. I made most of it in an apartment overlooking the Venice canals, a few blocks from the ocean, and I think it sounds like that: warm, a little loose, made by somebody who walks to the beach, blows bubbles, and isn’t too serious to have fun.

The making was a lot of fun. The finishing nearly broke me (more on that below).

Track Highlights from Mark

Anywhere We Go - This was the song on the record that I had already written off. It was a sketch from December 2021 that sat untouched for over four years, originally called Jolly Toad. It was headed for the trash. It was one of those tracks I liked but didn’t know how to move forward, and I’d stopped being able to hear it properly. What saved it was the moment I played it during a songwriting session with LosA and Jacob. We were looking for a song starter or demo from the old pile, my nearly cut list. That one lit them up. It got resurfaced. We reworked it, re-tracked a few parts, and I finished it. LosA named it and sings it, and the placeholder turned out to do more than hold a slot: she took the toad and built the lyric around mud, lilypads and being lost in a swampy Alice in Wonderland forest. I put it as the opening track because it opens wide, one of the two most dynamic tracks on the record, and it gives the album room to breathe before what comes after.

▶️ Anywhere We Go lyric video out August 30.

In Too Deep - The prototype, the problem child, and the second single. In Too Deep was the earliest song that pulled me to push to finish a house album. I started it with Kris Cruz a couple years ago. Thirty-seven project saves and ninety-two bounces over 923 days — this was also the song that fought me longest on the album. I struggled on the mix until I realized the two actual gaps were synth doubling and arrangement. The backing chords came off the Microfreak in mono; doubling them and panning left and right was what finally let it breathe. I inserted more transitions and added the automation it had been missing since 2024. One of my favorites, with LosA’s vocals and Jacob’s trumpet echoing her lead melody. The last artistic gap on the record, closed on July 17.

▶️ Watch the In Too Deep lyric video

Truth be Told - This is the nostalgic pause, the moment you step out of the club for a breather but the music somehow pulls you back. And so you’re dancing again, with a memory of other places, other selves, other dance floors. I wrote the demo and vocals early on and originally thought I’d cut the vocals, like I do on a lot of my instrumental tracks. But once Jacob recorded and reworked his transcendent trumpet, the remaining scratch vocals, treated and re-tracked, felt right. This track is an ode to my string-driven early tracks. Mixing it was mostly a hunt for one issue, and after that the track mostly called on me to leave it alone.

Frisbee Flow State - The lead single came together quickly in one of the first group sessions I had with LosA and Jacob. Not surprisingly we recorded it after a walk and frisbee session at sunset in Venice Beach. A great demo didn’t mean it didn’t take a host of revisions. The track I ruined and rebuilt the most times. This was the most-iterated track: thirty saves, sixty-two bounces, five parts grown to seventeen, 118 BPM pushed to 124. It also has the worst range-collapse story on the record (19.9 LU → 0.27 LU at its low point) and taught me nearly everything in the mixing section I document below. The music video was shot on Venice Beach with all three of us (and Olive the dog) and a frisbee, which is exactly as fun as it sounds.

▶️ Watch the Frisbee Flow State music video

Beethoven at the Beach House - The album’s oldest progeny, a sketch from May 28, 2021. This track is proof that you can make music a lot of ways (started this on an iPhone) and that I’ve been playing around with the House genre for a while. It sat in the vault for 1,874 days. Now a 1:42 sunset interlude with a real party happening in the background courtesy of LosA’s field recording. Also the cleanest finishing arc on the album. The production state and sound selection were strong enough that the mix was polish rather than rescue, and it went from produced to mixed to mastered to locked in a single evening.

Catalina Island - An instrumental that was written after Jacob, myself and some friends hiked the Transcatalina Trail. I nearly cut this track due to mixing issues. It’s on the album because a diagnostic saved it: once I found that the drum loop driving it was capping the entire mix, I rebuilt the groove from a drum machine and one-shots and the whole song opened up. Intuition was ready to cut this track. An auditing tool’s data talked me out of it. I kept it simple and made the mix flowy. It’s sometimes impossibly hard until it suddenly isn’t.

Eagle Eat Eagle World - Jacob and I crafted the core idea for this in just one or two sessions. From a mixing and final production perspective, it was the least resistant song on the album by nearly every measure: fourteen project saves, and it hit a perfect 8/8 scorecard on the first self-mix pass in just 45 minutes. It’s also the cleanest master on the record and has the tightest stereo image. Worth saying plainly: your revision count measures how hard a track fought you, not how good it is. Eagle barely fought at all.

I Want It All - “Ripping the seams from inside out…” One of the moodiest tracks on the album, and the longest at 4:16. Born as “Orford, Oregon Coast Jam” while traveling in the Pacific Northwest and I wrote it after a hilly run, seeing the cliffs, the waves and good vibes handed me the gift. This track also suffered from a drum loop that capped its mix ceiling. The loop itself measured a crest factor of 11.32 dB, the most squashed source material anywhere on the album. The groove felt like it carried too much of the song’s identity to swap out. On a lark, I rebuilt the drums anyway and the dynamics came back. It also carries one of the highest bounce-to-save ratios here — forty-one renders against twenty-one saves — which I’ve come to read as a doubt meter: this is a track I second-guessed a lot. LosA sings on it, and the working title reached her too, so she wrote to a foggy, cold coastline and the crashing waves below. Jacob’s horn slides in epically.

Joyous - Inspired by jungle trips and stays in Central America, this song was deliberately slowed down into something more adjacent to Organic Electronica than House. LosA added the lyrics and vocals that gave it soul and heart. This song luckily had decent drums when it came time to mix. I kept the short, dense, active arrangement, recognizing that it didn’t need to be (and likely never could be) the widest or most dynamic track on the record. That was fine. I stopped trying to make it one and I let it be done.

Marimba on Mars - The original demo was recorded after seeing an acoustic of Weezer live on a rooftop bar in Venice Beach, near the pier. Formerly “Welcome to the Gathering,” and the last track on the album to reach the finish line: mixing began on July 19, and the title didn’t land until August 8, three weeks before release. It’s one of the darkest things on the album spectrally and functions as the valley before the ending. LosA, Jacob and I opened it up in a session together and gave it a bouncy new bassline and the marimba that gifted us a name, it arrived as an alternate render nobody planned.

Echoes of a Life That Could Have Been - I wrote and recorded the original demo for this song in just two sessions. The lyrics started from a letter I imagined Anne Boleyn, Queen of England from 1533 to 1536, writing before her execution, and the turbulence of a moment like that. It’s a heavier origin and theme than the party vibes of a palm-tree album probably warrant, but it’s the song that earned its place in the back half. Having honed my mixing skills in previous weeks, it’s the track where my checklist and self-mixing finally clicked and I was done in about 45 minutes. It carries the most words (my own and LosA’s echoing additions): “I have chased ghosts through the halls of this place, echoes of a life that could have been”.

Last Breath House - “You are lost in a universe of self. The self lost in the self.” Another track that felt more gifted than created. I wrote the original version of this song in two short sessions (music and lyrics). Jacob added the fun dancing keys and added his signature horns. Sky played bass, and I sang. The closer, and an intentional exhale rather than a finish. After eleven tracks of party, this is the walk home.

Here are top lessons, learnings and observations making and finishing another album.

Your Previous Album Isn’t Going to Write the Next One

Creating art can be hard, and it can feel hard. This album challenged me and reminded me of a line from the writer John McPhee — that your last piece is never going to write the next one for you. In this case, my previous albums weren’t going to write, produce or finish this one. I had to show up and do the work.

I have to remind myself that every album I make (and most artists feel some version of this I believe) will at some point feel like this might be “the hardest album I’ve worked on yet.” That feeling is real, and it still shouldn’t stop you from continuing on.

Artist-to-artist: The struggle is real. The choices not always obvious. And you maybe eventually stop trusting yourself, your ears, your vibe, your energy and will want to give up. You might stop caring and wanting to finish. Psychologists sometimes call this an action crisis, and it’s normal. It isn’t that you lack the skills, or can’t do it, or have lost the goal — it’s that your momentum inevitably slows. Your felt sense of progress stalls and you get stuck in the middle, a nearly predictable moment when your confidence mysteriously wanes and the path ahead turns opaque. The worst part is that from inside it you can’t tell whether you’re in a long middle or a desperate end, whether to push or to turn around, and no amount of staring at the project resolves that.

You can’t look up books or online videos for the answer. You have to look in and accept that the path to making and finishing art is nonlinear and a bit quirky. Some creative decisions aren’t obvious and you’ll debate them endlessly, but at any given moment only a few moves are actually available to you. Pick one of those. Make the decision, make the move, and keep working through them one at a time. Embrace stages. Accept that sometimes it’ll feel like you are going backwards. Keep moving.

You just gotta keep moving. We don’t make original art in a paint-by-numbers manner and the so-called best practices might not work for you. Experiment. Write your own finishing music guidebook. The twists and turns are real. Journal. Take notes. Take a break. Come back. Keep going.

You Can’t Finish What You Haven’t Decided

One of the best lessons I’ve learned with finishing music that we finish songs, we finish a song, then we tackle and finish the next. Personally, I’ve used a host of practices to organize, manage and finish tracks. Historically on previous albums I have used a spreadsheet. For this album, I built my tool and software called Playback Pilot. It’s a local-first, file based music project management app built by a producer for music producers and I used it extensively through my finishing arc. I’ve written more about why I’m building it, and the problem isn’t just mine. In a survey we ran, producers finish less than half the music they start, and there’s a follow-up on what the ones who do finish are actually doing.

Initially, I used it during the post-demo stage and reworking state when I had a lot of initial demos and tracks. It’s good to have a lot of demos but a lot can be intimidating too. By my estimate, I eventually reached something like ~40 active tracks in the candidate pool for this album. That was too many and they were at various stages – some were pretty complete songs, other just a simple idea in need of more voices and some felt nearly worth tossing out. All of them were not yet done.

So the first thing I primarily did was relisten and sort them. Here is a video how me using Playback Pilot to navigate this decision loop of tracks being in and out:

Once you’ve imported a folder or catalog, each project or album gives you a list of your tracks as Candidates. Then one of your first available move, besides opening it up in your DAW (which should be your default), is deciding if a track is on Tracklist or Cut. So I used the audio player to listen to different versions of the audio and select the best. Along the way, as I auditioned and rehearsed the tracks, I took notes: gaps, issues, what I liked and didn’t, and ideally a menu of next actions and todos.

This is where the artist-as-selector mentality needs to enter. Don’t worry about some imagined end state. Just notice what you notice and leave yourself breadcrumbs for future music production sessions.

Notes or todo’s make it easy to just show up and do it. Let me share a little secret. Finishing most things depends on closing loops in a certain sequencing. You don’t finish an album. You take a thousand small and medium steps over multiple weeks, months or years to fully finish. The most important move is the move that takes your music forward.

To fully finish you have to and get to finish in a bunch of small ways. Celebrate the small wins. Just keep going.

After that, I recommend you articulate your producer pipeline and workflow steps.

The other thing this bought me was a place for other people’s notes to land. When Jacob and I did a listen-through and he had thoughts on three tracks, those notes went somewhere I’d actually find them two months later instead of into a text thread I’d never scroll back to. When LosA came over for a session, we worked off the list.

And getting from ~40 down to 12 is not an administrative act. It’s the hardest creative work in the project, because every cut is an admission that something you spent real hours on isn’t good enough or doesn’t fit this record. Making it a visible decision with a status attached, rather than a vague feeling I kept postponing, is most of what got it done.

The Mixing Gap and the Album’s Choice Point

In the spring, I hired a mix engineer for the two tracks I thought were closest to done: Frisbee Flow State and In Too Deep. This felt like the grown-up move. Stop trying to do it all. Don’t be precious or particular. Get help. Get it done. Hire a professional and ship the record.

So, I did hire a mix engineer, and I was initially really excited when I got something back a week or so later. As a whole and on multiple levels, the mix work on the first pass on that first track was really solid and noticeably better than my own pre-mix version. The vocals were more present and the trumpet sounded sharper. Unfortunately, it also felt off. It sounded flat and lifeless. The work was decent and probably usable but the issues called at me in a way that was hard to explain and identify.

The reality was that I got a deliverable but I didn’t get an audit, a conversation or a clear back and forth on what the mix engineer identified as problems nor the corrections he made. We iterated through several revisions but in the end it just didn’t get to what I was hoping for. As a music producer, I could hear that gaps remained, but I had no map of what they were, no formal vocabulary to call it and no way to know which of them were mix problems and which were my own production, arrangement or composition problems that no mixer could have fixed. I’d bought an output when what I really needed was information.

So, I was at a fork. I could accept the work and move the project forward. I could outsource the rest of the album, accept that the audio engineer was the professional, live with the result and finish, or I could skill up and and learn how to mix the album myself.

Ultimately, I chose the second option. I debated myself for several days and even recognized at that moment that it would cost me time, lead me to languish and hinder me towards actually finish. I might claim it was a brave artistic choice or about quality, but it was mostly a stubborn one. I would grit it out.

It did cost me months. It was solitary, unglamorous, frequently maddening work. I had to train my ears and buy new gear. I had to collect reference tracks and do dedicated deep listening sessions. I had to set up audio analysis tools and figure out the sonic characteristics for similar songs and artists in my genre target of deep house and jazz house. In short, in order to get my tracks to fit the genre and to reach a sound my ears demanded, I had to become a mix engineer and mix my own album: vocals, trumpet, arrangement dynamics, drum balances, all of it.

Six Things I Learned Mixing My Own Album

I’d been making music and albums for years without ever really mixing one. Here is the short version of what I found during months learning to mix and master.

1. Watch your limiter because it’s lying to you and your ears.

Based on a tip from Four Tet, I’ve had a limiter sitting on my master bus for years. A limiter is a form of compression. It also protects your speakers and ears too. It’s been on nearly every production session, and it made rough ideas sound finished and also was hiding every problem I needed to see: kick transients, bass and kick colliding, and whether I had any headroom left. Every decision I made was filtered through this artifact of a limiter on the master. It makes your mix sound loud which tricks you to think it also sound good

The fix is embarrassingly simple: when you’re making mix decisions, the master bus should be empty. If you want it louder, turn the monitor knob up.

2. Regular Deep Listening with Right Headphones.

Deep listening is a good practice on its own. Pick a song you love (or a reference track for the project), and sit and listen to it for 20 minutes or an hour. No phone, no distractions. Just noticing. If pulled, write down what you hear and what it’s doing. You will hear things on tracks you’ve heard a hundred times but never noticed.

I mix in a small apartment, so while I produce and jam on ADAM T5V monitors, I mostly mix on headphones. My long-time pair is the Sony MDR-7506: closed-back, mid-honest, and what I know best. Partway through this record I bought a pair of open-back Sennheiser HD 600s, and they became the most-trusted source for anything involving sub-bass or stereo image. I sign off on every track across five system in order: HD 600, MDR-7506, HD 280 Pro, AirPods, then a phone speaker. If it survives all five it translates.

Beyond the gear, mixing sessions merit a bit of preparation. Ensure you are well-rested and can focus. I recommend and feel like is also good to calibrate your ears, headphones and space when you’re mixing. I do this by starting most mixing sessions with some deep listening.

3. Build a reference library, and actually measure it.

You can’t hit a target you’ve never heard properly. So I built one. I collected about two dozen tracks in and around my genre: Tour-Maubourg, berlioz, Folamour, Chaos in the CBD, Jitwam, a Frankie Knuckles remix. I did dedicated deep listening sessions on each with open-back headphones, then ran every one through an audio analysis audit to get its actual numbers.

I noticed two things that surprised me.

Loudness and dynamic range are not the same target. Almost every house record I admired and studied is mastered loud, somewhere between −8 and −13 LUFS. I’d assumed that meant they were squashed like mine were. They weren’t. They were loud and still had dynamic range, six to eleven LU. I never had a loudness problem. I had loudness that crushed everything else.

berlioz’s “deep in it” became my target. I listened to this track a lot and it became, with some caveats, the best reference for my album. It sits way darker than I expected, with a spectral center around 1,090 Hz where I’d been drifting toward 3,000. Put next to Tour-Maubourg’s brighter, more dance-floor tracks, those two references framed the whole sonic space I was aiming at: a corridor running from about 1,300 to 3,000 Hz, dark enough to read as deep house, bright enough that the horns still cut.

That corridor turned out to be the most useful thing the whole exercise produced. Horns and cymbals push a mix bright, so my instinct all along had been that a house-and-horns record would live at the top of it or above. The references said the opposite: the jazziest thing I was listening to was also the darkest.

Eleven of the twelve tracks on the finished album landed inside that corridor. The one that didn’t is Frisbee Flow State, at 3,530 Hz — the brightest and least dynamic thing on the record, and also the track I released first as a single. Whether that was instinct or accident, the most radio-shaped song on the album is the one that led.

Once I had a target and could record and hear similar songs in the corridor, “does this sound right?” turned into a question I could actually answer, both with my ears and with measurement tools.

4. Get audio analysis tools and use them.

Once the references had numbers, I could give myself targets, not master targets but mix-prep targets, which are a different thing. For my genre that landed at roughly −16 to −18 LUFS, at least ~5 LU of range, crest above 18 dB, spectral center between 1,300 and 3,000 Hz, and left/right within 0.30 LU.

That last one is the most objective rule I found: every House reference I measured landed between 0.00 and 0.31 LU. The adjacent genres are looser; a couple of pop-dance masters drift to 0.40 and 0.50. So it’s a target for this kind of record rather than a law of mastering. My own tracks were running well outside it.

Here is how I score and visualize my House and Horns Mixing Scoreboard:

Every track on the record, measured and plotted against the reference library built while making it. The shaded box is the target zone the references defined. Top: brightness against dynamic range, where eleven of twelve sit inside the 1,300–3,000 Hz corridor, with only Frisbee Flow State out to the right. Bottom: crest factor against the three genre tiers, where the album’s spread runs wider than any single tier.

Then I measured every bounce I made against that scorecard, and the pattern was brutal. Frisbee Flow State had lost 99% of its dynamic range somewhere in production, before any mix engineer ever touched it. Range collapse is close to one-directional. Mixing claws back a little, mastering basically can’t. So it’s a production-stage problem, and I’d been creating it on nearly every track without knowing.

From there the work became a loop. Turn the limiter off. Group the session into a few buses and do a round of gain staging, meaning just setting the volume levels sensibly. Render a fresh bounce. Re-measure it. Make the next fix. Bounce again.

With reference tracks on one side and measurements on the other, I could finally self-mix a track end to end, over multiple rounds, and know whether each round had actually helped.

The toolkit for this is smaller than you’d think. I use the standard, entirely free analysis VSTs that come with my DAW. The paid versions do a few more things, but the basic ones tell me everything I needed here, and I’d rather put the money toward production tools I actually reach for.

5. Your drum loop might be the ceiling.

One of the stranger things I learned came from Catalina Island, a track I was ready to cut. I liked the vibe of the song and wanted Jacob’s trumpet to shine, but no matter what I did to the mix, the dynamics were dead and everything was flat. A step-by-step sonic forensic analysis revealed the culprit: a single Splice drum loop. The loop was already super compressed, mastered and squashed to such an extent it became the structural ceiling for the entire song. I couldn’t get the mix to budge. Once I silenced those drums, the mix and dynamics underneath breathed four times wider. I had to rebuild the groove from one-shots and the track went back on the album.

The bigger lesson: when a mix problem survives every fix you throw at it, stop assuming the problem is your moves and check what you fed in.

6. Make a mix checklist and reuse it.

Mixing was slow at first, but I got better. The gaps became more obvious to my ear, and the fixes turned out to be fairly predictable in most cases.

My first self-mix session took three hours to get one track where I wanted it. Over about two weeks of regular practice, a first pass on a track was taking me forty-five minutes.

My ears did not improve that much in two weeks. What happened is that after the first session I wrote down a checklist, the order I’d done things in: gain staging, then kick and bass, then the leads, then reverb and space, then automation, then bounce and measure. The next session I just followed it. Then I amended it. Then I followed it again. Rinse and repeat.

Mixing can feel like a skill or an art you either have or you don’t. A lot of it is training, patience, and a sequence you follow.

NOTE: There’s a longer, more technical version of all this — the measurements, the loop findings across multiple tracks, and the mix finishing system I built around them. But that’s a separate write-up for producers.

The Machinery of Finishing

Learning to mix gave me the skill. What actually got the album finished was building a way to know and say when a track was done. Because the gap between done and released is mostly just you. If you can give yourself a gate or series of them you need to hit, then once a track has passed those gates, you should call it it done and be done.

Alongside the mixing work I setup an audit tool that measures a bounce and scores it against targets I’d pulled from reference tracks in my genre. That turned finishing from a feeling into a gate: a track was done when my ears said yes and the numbers said yes. Not one or the other. When they disagreed, the disagreement was the actual information. It’s how I found both the limiter problem and the drum loop.

The payoff came in July, and it looked like luck but wasn’t. The album sat at zero tracks locked on July 11. On July 12, a single 2 hour 40 minute session took it to eight. Two more sessions on the 15th and 17th finished the last four. Zero to twelve in six days.

That sprint was only possible because the scaffolding already existed: the audit tool, the reference library, the session checklist, the delivery standard, all built slowly over the prior months, during a stretch where it felt like I was making no progress at all. The fast part is always downstream of a slow part nobody sees.

Album 8 inherits all of it. That’s the thing I most wanted at the start of this record and didn’t have: not more talent or more hours, but a sense of what the next rep is.

Collaboration

Jacob Burgdorf plays trumpet on all twelve tracks. This is our third album together, and he contributed over 60 recorded horn takes across the record, tracked largely in a push between February and May, including one March session that landed lead lines on three songs in a day.

It’s Jacob’s horn work that truly made this the house-and-horns project. His playing is the thread that makes a house record sound like this house record — without it these are competent deep house tracks, and with it they’re something I haven’t heard elsewhere.

LosA is a new addition to my music and changed what the album became. Seven tracks have her voice on them, and she wrote the lyrics she sings. The title for Anywhere We Go out of one of her own lyric, having spent most of its life as “Jolly Toad,” my Adjective-Animal generated name placeholder. Her title is obviously better. She also recorded the party ambiance that turns Beethoven at the Beach House from an interlude into a scene. Her vocal melodies, musical sense and vibes are one of a kind and grateful for her help on this album.

Honored mentions:

Kris Cruz was involved in an early version of In Too Deep with me back in January 2024 and came back at the very end to help me get the top end right on Frisbee Flow State.
Sky Bartlett played bass on Anywhere We Go and Last Breath House.

Creativity, Production and Time Tracking

I take a data-driven, time tracking approach to a lot of my life. Tracking my time and setting weekly targets shows me where the hours actually go and holds me accountable to input as part of tangible creative output. On this album, more than any before it, that data also changed what I did.

From the release of Forwards & Towards to the day the last track locked, I tracked 211 hours of album-specific music production across 364 days, almost exactly a year, over 251 sessions, averaging 4.1 hours per week. It’s the biggest and slowest-cooked record I’ve made.

Activity breakdown:

Reworking & Finishing: 38%
Jamming & Song Writing: 33%
Review & Planning: 25%
Practice & Learning: 4%
Release & Admin: 1%

211 hours across 364 days. Reworking and finishing took the largest share, with review and planning close behind.

Set against Album 6 (52% jamming, 32% reworking, 10% review), the inversion is the headline. Reviewing and relistening alone was a quarter of the project. That’s not overhead — that’s the evaluative half of the work, and I’d never budgeted for it before.

Effort density: 211 hours across 268 Ableton project saves is about 47 minutes per save; across 362 audio bounces, about 35 minutes per bounce. That’s the rhythm of the ears-plus-data loop: make one change, print it, check it, decide.

Revisions: 268 project saves and 362 renders across 12 tracks, a median of 21 saves per track, about 13% more iteration per track than Album 6. The spread is instructive: In Too Deep at 37 saves, Eagle Eat Eagle World at 14. Both are finished. Only one of them fought me.

Each bar is the number of Ableton project saves: every arrangement change, mix tweak or new idea getting its own version.

Collaborators: of my own 211 hours, about a third was collaborative. Counted as studio presence, Jacob was there for roughly 43 hours, LosA about 9, plus sessions with Sky and Kris. The shape matters more than the totals. The writing phase of this album was genuinely two- and three-handed, and the finishing phase was almost entirely solo. The “66% solo” average hides both halves.

How my own hours partition, with each session counted once, so joint sessions with two or more people land in Collab rather than over-crediting any one person.

The five-year excavation: I reconstructed the album’s real chronology from 172 timestamped Ableton saves. The oldest material goes back to May 2021, but 71% of all saves happened in 2026, peaking at 30 in April alone. Songs sat in the vault for years. Beethoven for 1,874 days, Anywhere We Go for 1,614. Then the whole record resolved in a few months. That’s the pattern of every album I’ve made, only more so.

The weekly rhythm across the year: a slow build through the writing phase, then the concentrated push where the mixing and finishing work happened.

One gut-check the data gave me: twelve of thirteen songs grew in part count and not one got trimmed. Most started as five-part sketches and ended between eleven and seventeen; Frisbee and Echoes both tripled. I like dense productions, so some of that is craft. But “finishing = adding layers” is the opposite of how finishing is usually described, and I want to watch on Album 8 whether that reflex is a choice or a way of deferring one.

Album comparison:

Album	Total Hours	Period	Pace
#3 Cosmic Coastlines	125h	19 weeks	6.5h/week
#4 Stardust and Dreams	123h	28 weeks	4.4h/week
#5 Chop Wood, Carry Water	155h	23 weeks	6.7h/week
#6 Forwards & Towards	158h	42 weeks	3.7h/week
#7 Palm Tree Party	211h	52 weeks	4.1h/week

The most hours of any album I’ve made, and the longest run, a full year, at a pace only slightly above the slowest.

On Finishing

The part I still find hard to reconcile is the arithmetic. Two hundred and eleven hours produced thirty-eight minutes of music.

Our effort means a great deal to us as makers and almost nothing to anyone listening. Nobody hears the 92 bounces of In Too Deep. Nobody hears the loop I replaced on Catalina. They hear a song and decide whether they like it. That’s the correct arrangement, and it took me a few albums to stop being faintly annoyed by it. Just make the art. Trust your process. Keep going.

What I’ve landed on is this: finishing isn’t a musical quality. It’s a mindset — an accepting, a contentment, a being-okay-with.

Part of that is deciding which game you’re actually playing. Any long project hands you a few of them at the same time: the artistic one, the deadline one, the story you tell about it after. I never really ranked mine, so there was always one I was still losing, and no moment where I let myself stop.

There’s a naive version of goals where the finish line is a place you arrive and the emotions there are all good ones. Long-arc projects don’t work like that. They move through phases, and they don’t offer a clean end. They offer finishing points, moments that either move you to the next stage or sit in your way like obstacles, weighing you down with ambiguity. I hit a lot of those this year and mistook several of them for the end. Getting the album done meant giving myself the added weeks and months for the mix work and everything else pulling at my time, until I was actually in the right space to be finished. Once I was, it finished fast.

Which is why the real feeling on July 20, when the last track locked and I called the album musically done, was relief rather than arrival. That’s what I felt and that’s ok. Winning the goal and claiming the ending are two different things, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been good at the second one.

I love these songs. I’ve loved them for months — I just knew they weren’t finished, and I couldn’t have told you exactly why until I honed my skills, built the tools to hear it and gave myself breaks to find what was missing. Now I’ve made the final moves, I have my own satisfaction in finishing and recognizing the winding journey. I’m content in the effort and the persistence and in not letting go through the ups and downs.

I don’t control the reception. That part was never mine. But I made a house album spanning jazz house and deep house with a lot of personal gems and fresh ideas in it, and I’m proud of it.

Hope you like it. Turn it up. Smile and dance.

About Stellar Mammals

Stellar Mammals is a creative project centered on instrumental positivity music for any number of situations, moods and selves, historically lofi and hip-hop leaning, with ambient and cinematic moments, and now, with Palm Tree Party, we are taking a turn toward house and dance music.

Checkout our recent work:

Along with creating the music and art, I’m pretty open about the journey and process. You can read an assortment of notes, blog posts and reflections on music production and creativity on my blog. Start with From Zero to Album: My Personal Music Production Learning Journey.

About the Artists

Stellar Mammals is a Venice Beach-based producer and technologist. His full catalog of music, projects and videos is online at StellarMammals.com. He is available for contact, performance, licensing, collaboration, music production and projects at StellarMammals@gmail.com.

Jacob Burgdorf is an LA-based trumpeter, musician and music teacher, originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Check him out at BurgdorfMusic.com and on Instagram.

Got a comment or question? Send me an email or reach out on social media.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): All music was written, composed, performed, produced and mixed by the credited artists. Mixing was done by Mark Koester. Mastering was done with LANDR. Liner notes were written by Mark. Album art is an original photograph taken in Venice, California, while canoeing and bubbling, treated and titled by the artist. AI tools were used to assist with production data analysis and proofreading and editing these notes.

Rocks on the Sledge: Scott, Amundsen, and the Races Within the Race to the South Pole

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

February 8, 1912. Mt. Buckley, Antarctica.

43-year old British expedition leader Robert Falcon Scott and his four companions are three weeks past the South Pole. Nearing the finish line, they had been greeted by a lone black marker flag and then, at the pole itself, the tent and flag of their Norwegian challengers. They had lost the race to the South Pole.

Roughly three hundred miles from their second place arrival at the pole and four hundred more from safety of their base of operations near the coast, they are fading. One member of the crew, Edgar Evans, has likely suffered a head injury in a recent crevasse fall and his behavior and energy to continue on are faltering. They are all exhausted, faces frostbitten, supplies running out. The season for exploring is closing in on them when Scott the career navy sailor would note in his journal that night: “A lot could be written on the delight of setting foot on rock after 14 weeks of snow and ice and nearly 7 out of sight of aught else. It is like going ashore after a sea voyage.”

They had made a kind of landfall and found some protection from the harshest of Antarctica’s wind and cold when they noticed something. Scott halts the descent, writing, “The moraine was obviously so interesting that when we had advanced some miles and got out of the wind, I decided to camp and spend the rest of the day geologising.”

The Terra Nova expedition had been scientifically minded from the beginning, and Scott had the right man beside him: Edward Wilson, doctor and trained naturalist. “We found ourselves under perpendicular cliffs of Beacon sandstone, weathering rapidly and carrying veritable coal seams,” Scott wrote. “From the last Wilson, with his sharp eyes, has picked several plant impressions, the last a piece of coal with beautifully traced leaves in layers.” In one afternoon they had bagged coal and fossil plants from Earth’s most remote region — finds that would prove a clue to the planet’s deep past. The next day they stopped and geologised again, Scott admitting he was now “too tired to write geological notes.”

Six weeks later, nearly 150 total days out, they would find themselves in a tent on the Ross Ice Shelf trapped in a blizzard, completely depleted and roughly 11 miles from One Ton Depot, a key cache for food and supplies. Their planning and preparations had failed them. Survival on thinning margins seemed increasingly unlikely. Evans had died and been left behind a month earlier. Oates elected to take his own life, walking out into a blizzard. Scott waited with Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers and scribbled one last diary entry dated March 29:

Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.

It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. SCOTT.

All five of Scott’s polar party died on the roughly 800-mile return. When a search party discovered their fate the following November, they found no fuel, scarcely any food, and thirty-five pounds of rocks on their sledge. Why still carry rocks?

Two weeks before Scott halted at Mt. Buckley, Norwegian expedition leader Roald Amundsen and his crew of four strolled back into their basecamp Framheim at 4am, deadpan, walking in on the sleeping camp as if back from a day trip. They had completed an out-and-back trip to the South Pole along a new route in 99 days. They came home with food to spare, having gained weight, though only 11 of their 52 dogs returned. Back in September 1909, at his home outside Christiania, Amundsen had ended his written plan with a single sentence: “Thus we shall be back from the Polar journey on January 25.”

It was January 25, 1912. Amundsen’s journal notes:

It was so still and quiet – they must be all asleep. We came in. Stubberud started up in his bunk and glared at us; no doubt he took us for ghosts…

“And what about the Pole? Have you been there?”

“Yes, of course; otherwise you would hardly have seen us again.”

Different start dates, different routes and a host of small and large factors, but the pacing tells a lot of the story. It took the Norwegians 57 days to reach the pole and 39 days to return. Scott’s crew required 78 days to reach the pole and 62 to their final camp. Scott’s hundredth day was February 8 when they stopped for geology. With 400 miles to go, the primary prize lost, and their margins narrowing, they were collecting rocks.

Scott's party at the South Pole, January 1912. Taken by Bowers with a string pull · The five who reached the Pole, at Hobart, March 1912 (Nasjonalbiblioteket)

Historians still debate what doomed Scott: poor preparation, freak weather, bad luck, fatal decisions, margins too thin to survive, or some combination.

Oftentimes when we set a goal, it carries much more than the target itself. We are also pursuing a story, a narrative identity, and even a public perception, all of which pulls on us beyond merely reaching what we hope to achieve. This larger tapestry — how we see and tell our goal pursuit in the moment and after — we might call goal framing. Our frame shapes how we prepare, how we make choices moment to moment, and how we read our situation when things turn ambiguous.

In short, goal framing defines the game we think we are playing.

In 1910-1911, two parties set out to reach the South Pole. Each took different modes to plan and pursue those goals. They also carried different ways to frame the pursuit. The 1911 race was framed by two 1909 events that preceded them, namely Cook and Peary’s dual claim of being the first to reach the North Pole and Shackleton’s own turning back 97 miles short of the South Pole. The Americans’ capture of the North Pole killed Amundsen’s original North Pole goal, a ghost goal that would haunt him in the years ahead, and forced a secret reframe and redirection for him and his crew originally slated for a voyage north.

Both Amundsen and Scott were preeminent explorers of their day and part of a final wave of explorers reaching the highest peaks and last unexplored and unclaimed places first. It was an era that fascinated the public, drove individuals to the extremes and cost the lives of most attempts. Yet the pull to reach the farthest, be the first, be the only to bag these unique prizes was an all-encompassing obsession for both men.

Roald Amundsen was the singularly-minded polar explorer specialist. Born into a family of shipowners and captains in 1872 in Borge (near Fredrikstad), Norway, then in union with Sweden, he was inspired by the lost Franklin Expedition and by Nansen’s 1888 crossing of Greenland and vowed early in life to become a polar explorer. Norwegian winters, including sleeping with the windows open, and long-distance and mountain skiing were his earliest trainings in his life ahead. Reluctantly he initially studied medicine to appease his mother but switched full-time to exploration after her death in 1893. His polar apprenticeship was marked by serving on the ship Belgica, where he experienced an Antarctic winter firsthand, and he used his Northwest Passage expedition — the first ever to sail it end to end — to spend two winters living and studying with the Netsilik Inuit, where he mastered dog driving, fur clothing, and snow shelters. He treated indigenous knowledge as expert knowledge, rare among European explorers of his era. Originally slated to attempt the North Pole, he secretly switched his target to the south upon learning of the American claims to the North Pole. The crew didn’t know until after they had departed. His brother Leon handled the announcement, delivering letters to Nansen and the king, informing the press, and sending the now-famous telegram that reached Scott in Melbourne: “Beg to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic - Amundsen.”

Robert Falcon Scott was the unexpected explorer. He came from modest origins and spent his life and career in the British Royal Navy, joining as a cadet at age 13. When his father’s brewery business later failed, his naval pay became his family’s main financial support. Polar exploration found him when he was hand-picked off a list of promising officer-candidates by Sir Clements Markham of the Royal Geographical Society to command the Discovery Expedition, a large-scale scientific and geographical exploration of a largely unexplored continent. Well-read but lacking both polar apprenticeship and key cold-weather skills, Scott came out of a proud Navy tradition that assumed a capable officer could command anything. He also embodied the noble and romantic lens of his era, which held science, endurance, improvisation and grit as the marks of a suffering hero’s worthy pursuit. Scott was decorated, celebrated, and already sailing south on his own dual mission of science and the pole when he opened Leon’s telegram in Melbourne and resolved to proceed “as though this had not happened.”

The race to the South Pole was on. So were the races within it.

The Frames: Which Game Are You Playing?

Goal pursuit is rarely linear. The science of goals is never as simple as just setting a goal. Goals go through many phases, are often bound to get stuck in the middle, and can face the ambiguity of determining if we are in a long middle or the desperate end. Goals carry a range of emotions, shape our identity and confront us with uncertain choices throughout.

While often framed as a race to the pole, to both Amundsen and Scott this was really a two-faced race: Who could reach the pole first AND, after, who could get the word out?

The pressure was sharpened by the 1909 Cook–Peary controversy: two rival claims to the North Pole, an announcement war, and no clean winner. A pole was a race with no referee at the finish line, and being first only counted if you were first to be heard and believed. Both leaders planned for it. Amundsen had sold exclusive rights to his story to London’s Daily Chronicle. He left his brother Leon in Christiania, Norway, to run the press, and when the Fram reached Hobart, Australia in March 1912, he sent coded telegrams to Leon, to Nansen, and to the king before wiring the full story to the Chronicle the next day. Scott carried a matching contract with the Central News Agency in London.

Scott’s plan was similarly delineated and would outlive him. When the Terra Nova returned to New Zealand in February 1913, his men went ashore with their own coded cable, refused every question, and kept the ship at sea for the designated twenty-four hours while the news of his death traveled by telegraph to London first. Even the announcement of his fatal ending ran on plan.

“Science Would Have to Look After Itself”

For Amundsen, his pursuit was singular. As he wrote in his diary, “At all costs we had to be first at the finish… Science would have to look after itself.” He knew what mattered most to him and his crew: the pole prize, and anything that impeded that would be secondary. Amundsen had spent years preparing and, even though they made modifications as they tested and finalized to departure, their approach was well-defined and the pursuit of the pole was methodical. At the same time, he also recognized that “we could not reach the Pole… without enriching different branches of science.”

For Scott, his crew’s pursuit was multifaceted and framed by a range of goals and storytelling. As Wilson, a member of his crew, put it, “We want the Scientific work to make the bagging of the Pole merely an item in the results.” They were pursuing science, experimenting with multiple modes of transportation, and making tweaks and modifications on gear and their crew even as they pushed to reach the pole. Along with reaching the pole first, Scott had a host of side quests and extra brownie points that could be counted as “winning” too.

Sledges and dog teams, 1911-12 (Nasjonalbiblioteket) · Adolf Lindstrom in the Framheim kitchen, 1911 (Nasjonalbiblioteket) · William Lashly with a Wolseley motor sleigh

Fortunately for our purposes and for historians alike, both crews kept daily diaries. In Race for the South Pole (2010), Roland Huntford lays these journal entries out side by side, day by day. Along with the photographic record, these pages from Scott, Amundsen, and that of Olav Bjaaland, the champion skier in Amundsen’s party, give us an in-the-moment view as they pursue and return from the pole. Just miles apart, we get the same days, same continent, read from two different tents.

In reading these journal entries, we encounter a record of facts: date, location, temperature, weather conditions, distance traveled, and food as well as the health and status of their crew and transport. For Scott, this initially is a combination of motor sledges, ponies, and dogs, followed by manhauling for the final stretch and return. For Amundsen and Bjaaland, it’s all about skiing and their dogs and many of their notes read like a nordic ski excursion and a commentary on the state of the snow. Bjaaland’s entries could pass for a ski-touring log: “Well now the road to the Pole is clear – may we soon be there,” he writes from the plateau, then: “Biscuit crumb pudding here at 86° tasted good.”

Olav Bjaaland with his dog team at the South Pole, 14 December 1911 (Nasjonalbiblioteket)

Frames Have Authors

As both crews were pursuing the South Pole, their words scribbled in their cold tents offer a first-hand account of their physical and mental journeys. In their hundreds of entries, we also get to witness their frames and how they perform them. Every frame has an author, and each of these three men was writing for a different reader or, in the case of Bjaaland, no reader at all.

We can’t entirely take them at their word, because they were authoring stories, sometimes inherited ones, and actively preparing for the afterwards and subsequent phases that would follow once they had reached their goal.

Scott was writing inside of a frame partially inherited from other explorers and built by a British heroic tradition where he was meant to mark his name and quest for posterity. Besides being first to the pole and the science, Scott carried one more goal frame: book writer. Scott was preparing a book during his expedition and his diary, especially the final entries, were clearly speaking to a public reception he foresaw and one he was trying to compose. Scott’s diary was edited before publication with certain passages cut or softened by its editor, Leonard Huxley, with input from his widow. The edited version Scott’s Last Expedition was published in 1913, became an immediate bestseller, and canonized Scott as the heroic explorer martyr for the next sixty years. Huntford’s 1979 revision flipped this interpretation. Much like his life, even in death, Scott’s frame had co-authors.

By contrast, Amundsen was authoring a singular frame end to end. His writings are accurate descriptions of the methodical pursuit and some of his observations along the way. His voice reads focused and determined, though his caring and graciousness towards his crew is displayed in his preparations and some key moments during the journey too. By and large, he is a man in control whose aim was conquering of the pole first and telling the news and selling the tale first too. The frame had one main protagonist and one lead author and it was him.

Arguably, Bjaaland’s journey and journals are perhaps the least biased because it was intended only for himself. He wasn’t an expedition leader nor a hero. He wasn’t inheriting a particular societal view of the hero’s arc like Scott nor bound to an explorer’s life identity like Amundsen. The physical challenges and risks he took are often underplayed. This is the diary of a man with no public frame to maintain, merely his private observations, humor, wonder, wordplay, and honesty in the here and now he lived through.

Scott was writing a book mid-expedition; Amundsen was authoring a conquest; Bjaaland was writing to nobody. When they disagree, which should we hold with more credence? Is the audience-less one the better witness?

Two Games at Once: Always a Game You’re Winning

The pole race ended for Scott on January 16, 1912, when a black marker flag rose out of the white ahead of them. The next day, after all of their suffering and sacrifices, they stood at the pole itself, second. With a change in tone and a reinterpretation of their efforts, Scott remarked in his log, “Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.” Then, with somber mood and mixed emotions, he added, “Well, it is something to have got here.”

Wisting, Bjaaland, Hassel and Amundsen at the South Pole, December 1911 (Nasjonalbiblioteket) · Scott's party at Amundsen's tent, Polheim, January 1912

But for someone who had banked a host of key decisions, achievements, and wins in the lead up to this heartbreaking moment, only one of Scott’s games ended that day. His expedition’s overall pursuit was salvageable. His story could still be authored as grand and meaningful. His scientific explorer identity could be maintained by simply redefining what mattered inside of his own goal frames. The science game was still winnable. The fallback was not improvised in defeat. Scott had written it down months earlier, in winter quarters, before the polar journey even began:

“It is a really satisfactory state of affairs all round. If the Southern journey comes off, nothing, not even priority at the Pole, can prevent the Expedition ranking as one of the most important that ever entered the Polar regions.”

The alternative win condition had been on the books since September. When the race was lost, the ranking of his goals only needed to shift.

It’s hard not to see Scott’s subsequent moves in coming weeks as a fatalistic turn. Their 800-mile return faced a host of challenges, some of them outside their control, and on increasingly narrow margins. This compounded with poor planning, ill-conceived decisions and consequential improvisation. Scott’s expedition and his diary are framed on the pole goal but also remarkably oscillate between other interests and frames including science, invention, transport experiments, and even social status. In reading his diary entries, it seems clear that he was also living in a goal pursuit with multiple, competing frames and lacking in crucial guardrails.

So in early February 1912 when Scott and crew finally reached exposed rock for the first time in months, one of these other goal frames pulled on him and Wilson, chief of the scientific staff and a trained naturalist, and rather than push primarily towards safety, they paused to do a bit of geology. This wasn’t madness nor simple fatalism nor even poor leadership, because the geology stop granted a still-winnable game and possibly a consolation prize too. Inside of one of his frames, this offered up a rational move.

Goal researchers refer to this cognitive process where activating a goal automatically blocks off distractions, inhibits competing interests and improves performance as goal shielding. In normal circumstances, this phenomenon can be a powerful force multiplier by protecting mental resources and enabling you to focus on a single task until it’s done. Goal shielding has a negative side too, because a perfectly shielded goal suppresses the warning signals that should trigger reflection, re-evaluation, and alternative actions.

With multiple frames there was always a game Scott was winning, and the winning game shielded him from the verdict of the losing one. Goal shielding through multiple frames meant he could see no other path but the ongoing pursuit. No signal ever said stop in every game at once. You have to lower your goal shield to sometimes see the goal you are pursuing or frame you are living is no longer viable or, in Scott’s case, no longer survivable.

So “Why still carry rocks?” Because in one of the games he was playing, he could still win and those rocks were the trophies.

As a product builder, entrepreneur and creative myself, I see this in my own goal pursuits. We often have to give ourselves a frame that makes the likely failure of our venture less painful, more comforting, and more confirming such that even in a loss, we can say that we have won; even in failure, we gained something.

The Game Was Choosable: A Live Donkey or a Dead Lion?

January 1909, 88°23′S, 97 miles short of the South Pole, Antarctica.

Ernest Shackleton does the arithmetic and determines that they won’t have enough food to make it to the pole. So, he elects to turn back, brings every man home alive and reportedly tells his wife, Emily, “I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.” Shackleton, the shadow competitor and explorer that Scott and Amundsen both measured themselves up to before and during their own expeditions, showed that you could choose an exit option. Besides the two-door alternatives of win and survive vs. win and die, there was come home alive with the record. Scott may have been driven to be heralded as the lion but Shackleton showed that a live donkey was not just survivable but could be celebrated too. Shackleton’s 1909 turn-back was rewarded publicly when he returned home alive, a national hero, and was knighted.

Marshall, Wild and Shackleton at 88 degrees 23 minutes south, 9 January 1909, ninety-seven miles short. Photographed by Adams, the fourth man (J. B. Adams) · The Arrol-Johnston car, the first motor vehicle taken to Antarctica · Camp with ponies, the other bet Scott would repeat

Admittedly, Amundsen didn’t need to abandon his quest to reach the pole. His planning, strategy and team meant he never faced Shackleton’s arithmetic, but I’d argue that Amundsen could have answered this challenge, because he was racing one game: reach the pole and get back alive to announce it, and with only one game in play, the exit was legible. A single framed goal pursuit means you know exactly where your guardrails are and what losing looks like, so you’ve defined the conditions for turning back before you left.

Arguably, Scott had no frame in which turning back counted as anything but a loss. In the race game, turning back would be quitting. In the hero game, suffering was romanticized and death always on the table. In the science game, there was no going home empty-handed. In the book game, a retreat writes no third act. And in the announcement game, there was nothing worth wiring home. An exit strategy requires knowing which game you’d be exiting and under what conditions. For Scott gambling on many games, “turn back” was never one decision but five.

In the final days trapped in the tent, Scott wrote one more document alongside the diary, a “Message to the Public”:

We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last…

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale…

In his final words, we observe Scott’s spirit, the national pride underneath, and a romantic hero’s quest embodied. His own dying hand, on his final page, shows one of his final games: the story, the book, posterity, and the audience beyond. His 1913 bestseller proved one game was won, a story he was forever writing and one that would outlive him.

Which Game Are You Racing?

Three men, three ways of holding a frame. Amundsen raced a single game with a legible exit. Scott ran five games at once, with no exit legible in any of them. And Shackleton had already shown them both that the game itself was choosable.

Why still carry rocks? Scott answered the question himself, two weeks before the end, in an entry headed “Friday, March 16 or Saturday 17. — Lost track of dates.” A man no longer sure what day it was, itemizing what to keep and what to abandon:

We leave here our theodolite, a camera, and Oates’ sleeping-bags. Diaries, &c., and geological specimens carried at Wilson’s special request, will be found with us or on our sledge.

The theodolite, a survey instrument whose readings had proved they reached the pole, could go. That pole game was over. Proof already obtained. The camera could go too with the photographs already exposed. What stayed were the games not yet over, still being run: the diaries, a story still being written, and thirty-five pounds of rock, the trophies of a game they had played from the beginning and could still win, kept “at Wilson’s special request,” on a sledge pulled by the remaining dying men. Having shed nearly everything else, what they carried to the end revealed their final ranking, made physical.

The specimens were recovered with the bodies by a search party in November 1912 and were sent to Cambridge’s eminent palaeobotanist, A.C. Seward. Published in 1914, Seward identified the leaf impressions as Glossopteris indica, a fossil plant previously described from the Gondwana rocks of India. Same plant found on two continents an ocean apart. Geologists used these clues and others to confirm the existence of the supercontinent known as Gondwanaland, which had once joined what are now South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Zealandia, Arabia, and the Indian subcontinent. In a strange bit of overlapping timing, German geologist Alfred Wegener first proposed continental drift in a lecture in January 1912, the same month when Scott’s party stood second at the pole. His theory was reportedly laughed at in Frankfurt while they were hauling out the evidence in Antarctica that would justify him and this new theory.

No one made Scott carry those rocks, and none of us can quite say what they prove either. Score him by the race and he lost. Score him by the science and he won, posthumously and spectacularly. Score him by the story he co-authored and he won for sixty years, until the frame flipped. Same rocks, same sledge, same eleven miles. The verdict depends entirely on which of his games you choose to score. Scott played several; he never chose just one. So every verdict since has had to make the choice he didn’t. Hero’s tale, warning sign, vindication: the facts don’t decide. The frame does.

Everyone holds several frames at once: the public race, the inner game, the side quests, the consolation narratives. What moves after a defeat usually isn’t which frames you hold. What moves is your ranking — which one you put first, and how you tell the story. The frames are always there. And there is always a frame that lets you say you won.

Which game are you actually playing, and who is writing your frame?

Goal Pursuit Series (my posts):

Is This the Long Middle or the Desperate End?: the companion essay on Greely’s expedition and phase ambiguity during the pursuit
The Unemployed Explorer: Ruth Harkness, the after-phase, and endings claimed or unclaimed
Multi-Stage Goal Pursuits: the Rubicon model of goal phases
Stuck in the Middle: midpoint motivation collapse and the action crisis
The Ostrich Problem: why we avoid checking progress on goals we care about
The Science of Goals: an overview of the goal-science literature

Sources

Written:

Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen, edited by Roland Huntford (2010): the rival diaries laid side by side, day by day — the book this essay grew out of
Scott’s Last Expedition, Vol. I by Robert Falcon Scott (1913): the published diaries, source of the Scott quotations here; free at Project Gutenberg
The South Pole by Roald Amundsen (1912): his own account, source of the Framheim homecoming and the 1909 plan; free at Project Gutenberg
A.C. Seward, Antarctic Fossil Plants (1914): the identification of the Glossopteris specimens
Shah, Friedman & Kruglanski, “Forgetting All Else: On the Antecedents and Consequences of Goal Shielding” (2002): the goal-shielding research

Photographs:

All photographs here are public domain in the United States, having been published well before 1929. The Amundsen expedition images (the dog teams, the Framheim kitchen, Bjaaland with his team, the group at the Pole and the five men at Hobart) are from the Norwegian National Library (Nasjonalbiblioteket). The group portrait of Scott’s party at the Pole was taken by Henry Bowers with a string pull. The Nimrod motor car and pony camp come from the Alfred Wegener Institute archive and are attributed to Shackleton himself; the farthest-south photograph at 88°23’S stands outside that series and is Adams’. All via Wikimedia Commons.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with structural scaffolding, editing prose, verifying quotations and dates against the primary sources, and surfacing source material from prior notes. The cover image was designed by the author.

The Unemployed Explorer: Panda Lady Ruth Harkness Won Her Goal but Never Claimed Her Second Act

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

JULY 1938. Qionglai Shan, Sichuan, China.

The world’s most famous panda catcher was over nine thousand feet up, totally isolated, wet and waiting in a remote cave. A torrent of rain had trapped her and her local cook. They ate fried cucumbers and coagulated chicken blood for breakfast as streams ran through the middle of their primitive camp.

“My one quilt is so wet it could be almost wrung out…full of fleas…all my clothing is clammy and my feet are never dry.” Her Chinese companion lit incense and burned paper in hopes of appeasing the mountain gods. Both were miserable as they waited and wondered.

Would the panda cub return? Did she want it to come back? Would it remember her? Could it survive alone?

Ruth Harkness (1900–1947) was on her third panda expedition in China. She had recently published her memoir The Lady and the Panda describing her husband’s failed panda hunt, his lonely death from cancer in Shanghai, and her decision to retrieve his remains and take up his quest as her own.

Ruth Harkness with Su Lin, c. 1936. She set out to inherit a hunting trip and came back cradling the animal. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Against all expectations, this widowed dress designer from New York had done it. Over two seasons in late 1936 and again in 1937 she’d adventured into this remote mountainous region of China, and her expeditions had captured the first and second live pandas ever brought out of the country. These two black and white bundles of cuteness were delivered to the United States and received by record crowds at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. Ruth herself was lauded on best-dressed lists and even appeared in a Quaker Oats ad.

This was to be her third expedition, but in these final moments, she was not panda hunting; she was panda returning. Days earlier and with a heavy heart, she had carried another captured panda up this mountain. Unlike her previous panda babies, Su-Sen, “little tomboy,” a tree-climbing kindred spirit who Ruth described as “utterly fearless—nonchalant and doesn’t give a damn about anything,” was being set loose near the spot where the panda had been captured.

Ruth Harkness must have been awash in emotions and memories as she “watched for the beloved Su-Sen constantly, and hoped she would never see her again.” Her own expedition, as she later wrote, “put in reverse.”

She was the panda-woman with no panda left to hunt. One panda carried down the mountain. One carried back up. Same woman, same goal, but now standing at different phases and landing at the ambiguity that is the crossroads of momentous endings and potentially new beginnings.

What happens when the end you wanted and strived for arrives? How do we navigate the after-phase once we’ve reached a goal or a peak goal like Ruth Harkness did?

As we pursue our goals and our life journeys, we go through different phases that call upon us to read the situation, face decisive moments, and make choices. For most of us these are the forks in the road that define a life. For some these forks and phase reading carry deadly consequences if we read the phase wrong.

Years earlier, from 1881 to 1884, Adolphus Greely and an American crew had successfully planned and staged an epic two-year arctic expedition on remote Ellesmere Island near Greenland. They established a stable basecamp, thrived as a crew, mapped new regions and recorded a wealth of new data. They had achieved their “farthest north.” But as their expected relief ship failed to appear for two summers, thin margins and misfortune compounded as they remained stuck across an icy sea waiting for rescue and wondering how their fate would turn out: Was this the long middle before rescue or the desperate end?

Ruth Harkness had achieved her goal and was, by most accounts, deemed to be the greatest in her field: a triumphant and successful explorer in a world and era dominated by men and epitomized by shot and mounted dead animals while she acted as a mother and had brought a living being home. But her story if viewed across multiple stages carries harder lessons and deeper questions into her ability and our own to handle the post-peak and the post-goal phase.

Ending a phase and finishing a goal are different skills and mindsets than pursuit. Our skills in goal pursuit don’t transfer or teach us how to adjust to what comes after. Harkness pursued the singular thing and mastered the pursuit, but, as we will see, she never found her way through the ending and transition. She could chase but couldn’t disengage from what had defined her nor re-engage with her next new thing.

Finishing hard things is often experienced more as a form of relief than the long expected satisfaction we had hoped for. We envision finishing as a gate we pass through changed and forever satisfied — psychologists call this expectation the arrival fallacy. Instead, strangely, finishing hits us with loss, regrets and a mixed up sense of self and agency.

Put poetically, we can accomplish the mechanics of finishing a thing but we will inevitably experience a certain letdown and uncertainty after, calling for and challenging us to navigate the finishing of a chapter of a life: knowing you’re done, letting go, and starting the next thing. There is a void between a finished pursuit and the unstarted next thing.

The Lady and the Panda: From Widowed Dressmaker to World-Famous Explorer

This retelling draws on Vicki Constantine Croke’s The Lady and the Panda (2005), reconstructed from Harkness’s letters home alongside her own memoir (1938) and Pangoan Diary (1942). Croke traces Harkness’s routes, local guides and timelines in vivid detail against a China sliding toward World War Two — a war that would eventually bomb Harkness’s own Shanghai hotel.

Born in 1900 to a working-class family in small-town Pennsylvania, Ruth McCombs left for New York and spent her early adulthood as a dress designer. Part of the flapper generation, she drank, smoked and socialized late. After years of dating, she married William Harkness Jr. on September 9, 1934, and within two weeks, he departed for China without Ruth.

Bill was the expected hero of this story: a wealthy, Harvard-educated adventurer who had already captured Komodo dragons in Indonesia and was now angling for the greatest prize amongst swashbuckling hunters and collectors: the giant panda, an animal no Westerner had ever brought out of China alive. The Roosevelt brothers Theodore Jr. and Kermit, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt and well-funded by Chicago’s Field Museum, had famously shot a panda in 1929, ushering in a period of “expedition after expedition” marching into panda country for their shot.

Catching a live one was, as Ruth later wrote, “just a shot in the dark — one chance in a million.” Bill never got his shot. An ocean and a continent away from his wife, he spent two years stalled in Shanghai with permit problems, a dysfunctional partnership, and endless delays. He died there of throat cancer in February 1936, without ever seeing panda country.

That left Ruth, age 35, widowed, at a choice point. She must have wanted to join that original expedition, having heard her husband’s panda planning for years. She had been excluded as a woman. With no expedition experience, no standing in the boys’ club of exploration, and with nearly everyone doubting her, she took up her modest monetary inheritance of about $20,000 and inherited her husband’s goal too. Having imagined joining years before, I’d say she was clear-eyed that this was a chance worth taking on her own. So she took it and, in the spring of 1936, she sailed for Shanghai to collect Bill’s ashes and to finish what he had started.

In Shanghai, Harkness took up her husband’s mission but almost immediately rejected most of his method and his original team. Bill’s old partner, the veteran collector Floyd Tangier Smith, expected to continue the original arrangement with the widow. After weeks of discussions, she cut him loose. She explained her reasoning plainly in a letter home, “I had the utmost confidence in Quentin [her new guide]. He knew the country, the language; I felt that I did not need a foreigner; in fact, I did not want another foreigner, for by that time I had seen enough of the attitude of most Westerners in China to heartily resent it.”

She didn’t wait on the paperwork or the “old China hands.” She just went for it, quietly and with local help: Quentin Young, a 22-year-old Chinese explorer whose older brother had guided the Roosevelts, and Wang Whai Hsin, a happy, quirky Sichuanese cook who would end up beside her on all of her three expeditions into remote China.

Yang Di Lin -- Quentin Young, age 22, who reached into the spruce and lifted out Su Lin

Along with letting go of the old crew, she let go Bill’s exuberant and unnecessary provisions too. In a rented Shanghai garage, she and Young pried open the supplies Bill had amassed for a proper gentleman’s expedition: folding stoves, nine saddles, 336 pairs of thick wool socks, and in Ruth’s words “an armoury of guns.” She took almost none of it. What she kept was Bill’s own clothing, cut down by her tailor to fit her, and the smallest pair of his hobnailed boots, which she had resized to fit by a Chinese shoemaker. She had taken over his mission, and now she would be walking in his boots.

Among her many reductions, she made a few significant additions. She packed baby bottles and formula revealing a new wrinkle in her plan. While Bill had set out to capture a live adult giant panda that can weigh 200 pounds or more (90 kg), her target was finding a baby panda cub who she hoped to capture, carry, and care for as a surrogate mother all the way back to the United States. She didn’t want a pelt. She wanted an alive and healthy smaller bear instead.

What followed happened at a speed that put the expeditions before her to shame.

On September 27, 1936, she started up the Yangtze River by boat to Chongqing. Then on October 20, her small caravan walked out of Chengdu’s west gate toward the mountains considered the foothills of the Tibetan plateau. The days ahead mixed roughness with joy and wonder as they traversed dirt roads, bandit country and deprivation rarely visited by Westerners. From a squalid inn she wrote home that it was “all very wonderful — even the appalling ‘terlets’” — her spelling of the open-pit latrines. Even that, she felt, couldn’t “dim the lustre of this particular expedition.” At Wenchuan they slept in a ruined Buddhist “ghost temple,” where souls in purgatory and life-size blue horses, one headless, were painted brilliantly over walls in the empty rooms they camped in. From there they pushed higher, making an empty monastery they called “the castle” their base for the panda search ahead.

Harkness stayed behind at basecamp as local crews searched into the heavily forested mountains around them. Amazingly, local hunters stumbled upon an unbelievable find, and on November 9, in dense mountain fog, ten thousand feet above sea level, Quentin Young reached into the hollow trunk of an old spruce tree and pulled out a three-pound panda cub. They had captured a panda baby.

"A Ball of Fur (her first picture)" -- Su Lin, nine weeks old, November 1936

They would name the baby bear Su-Lin and Harkness would care for her like a mother, calling her simply “Baby.” Bill had spent two years preparing and waiting without ever reaching the field. Ruth had been in the field about six weeks and had captured the prize. “No childhood fairy tale,” she wrote, “was more dreamlike, or more lost in a dim haze of make-believe.”

The march down the mountain and homewards was a triumph. Carrying Su-Lin — “the most precious thing I ever possessed” — the small team retraced in days what had taken weeks. The stretch from the castle down to Wenchuan, which had taken five days on the way out, they were able to cover in a single ten-hour push. They crossed over the swaying bamboo bridge over the Min River and later into Guanxian, a township and ancient irrigation system now known as Dujiangyan, built around 256 BC in the Qin era and still in operation today. (On a personal note: this happens to be a short distance from where I lived in China for several years, at the Daoist Monastery Mountain Qingcheng Shan.) A car picked them up and transported them into Chengdu on November 16, and a flight the next day with Su-Lin riding the cockpit as Captain Mac’s “pidgin cargo” landed them in Shanghai.

Wha-gar Caravan · Su Lin Begins Her Journey on Gao's Back · A Bamboo Bridge

Croke writes: “these had been the happiest days of her life and it was hard to let go. Her success in proving wrong all those patronizing people in Shanghai and New York would seem so much smaller a contentment than that of a hard march, of picking herself up when she thought she couldn’t walk another mile and walking two more miles… Life here had been the appreciation of a single perfect egg, of experiencing so completely the fullness of a moment that it left no room for longing.”

Getting the panda out of China took a bit of luck and one last improvisation. Detained by customs in Shanghai, Harkness worked her connections until, on December 2, she boarded the ocean liner President McKinley with Su-Lin and an export voucher reading, in full, “One dog, $20.00.” Just over two weeks later, she stepped off the boat in San Francisco to what the Examiner called “the greatest press reception San Francisco lavished upon any celebrity since the coming of George Bernard Shaw.” The New York Times had once dismissed hers as a “much hooted-at expedition.” Now the media and public couldn’t get enough as she took a series of trains and PR stops eastwards. “All that seemed lacking,” that same New York Times noted upon her arrival in New York, “was a ticker-tape parade and a reception at City Hall.”

Su Lin's Two Amahs · Sniffing the Pacific

By February, Su-Lin was in Chicago drawing record crowds at the Brookfield Zoo — the first live giant panda in America, on display in the same city whose Field Museum still exhibited the panda pelt the Roosevelts had shot. The dress designer had outdone the great hunters. She was thirty-six and, though she could not know it, standing at the peak of her life.

Three Endings Offered

The science of goals tells us that a pursuit isn’t a singular event or moment but a multi-stage journey. Before we commit, we deliberate. Once we commit, we cross into action. We hit middles that sag, delay us and lead us into reconsideration. When progress stalls or our desire for the goal wobbles, we can slip into what researchers call an action crisis, a kind of “stuck in the middle” languishing characterized by self-doubt, diminishing motivation and a lull in progress where we re-ask whether the goal is worth pursuing at all.

We often reduce the retelling of most goals to its two bookends: the decision to start and the final act culminating in the triumph or the anguish of failure, leaving out much of the struggle, phase reading and decision-making that actually defines pursuing a goal. Interestingly, the goal literature tends to focus on the starting, the persisting, the pushing through and the finish and goes strangely quiet at the far end of the arc: the exits, the endings, the after. Even the research on letting go of goals mostly studies goals we failed to reach. The literature goes quiet after the win. But what about the goal you achieved and the chapter that comes after?

Seen through this question and lens, Ruth’s decade after her peak was not one long slide or even a cautionary tale on the perils of the post-peak, but instead as I’d like to argue, a case study in phase reading and navigating what comes after goal pursuit.

At least three times over that final decade, life offered Ruth Harkness an ending to her panda chapter — a moment where an exit was on offer and a phase had to be read. Could she see the endings offered? Can any of us, from inside the moment?

Let’s look at her three offered endings and what became of each.

The Triumph: Spring 1937

The end of 1936 and start of 1937 offered the purest ending to her tale.

As the winter of 1936 thawed into spring 1937, a host of triumphs arrived in succession. While Ruth and the cub wintered in a New York hotel, the fetes began. On January 16, 1937, she became the first woman ever to attend the annual banquet of the all-male Explorers Club, a club whose members had included Teddy Roosevelt, Shackleton, Peary, and Byrd. During the event, she held Su-Lin up to the microphone for a live radio broadcast and the baby panda cried on air. The widow who months earlier had no standing in the boys’ club of exploration now stood at the forefront of it.

Panda-fever took over the country. In February, Su-Lin was officially welcomed at the Brookfield Zoo to record-breaking crowds and “quite effortlessly” became “the most popular animal in the country.” Ruth landed a book deal to tell her story. And Brookfield paid her $8,750 for Su-Lin, which was much less than she had hoped for, and framed, tellingly, as funding for her next expedition.

"Good-by" -- handing Su Lin to Brookfield, the first ending she declined to take (Chicago Tribune)

Here was her first ending on offer: the woman explorer who had followed her husband’s goal and beaten the great hunters, captured a panda, and brought it back alive. Now she had a book deal and legendary tale to mint in her own words. She could have stopped. Nothing about this moment demanded another panda.

But the goal had already grown a sequel. Su-Lin, then thought to be a female, needed a mate, and Ruth was “so mad to get back to that life of adventure” that she took the smaller check and figured she’d make do. When she arrived back in late summer 1937, Japan and China were at war and Shanghai was under bombardment. As she jokingly wrote home, “You’d better get out your maps children…[because] I’ve changed my course…and Pandas.” With the previous river route blocked, she rerouted across half of Asia to reach Sichuan again.

While they’d follow a similar route into the mountain and stay at the same abandoned temples and spots, the second expedition’s crew had changed. In spite of her letters, Quentin Young had vanished, and so Wang Whai Hsin, her cook who spoke only pidgin English, became her entire team. The pair wintered alone in the ruined castle while a hired crew of around a hundred local hunters swept the mountains without her in search of Panda Number Two.

Her letters home turned dark as isolation, culture shock, uncertainty and waiting weighed her. “Slowly but inevitably I am losing my mind,” she wrote, and she leaned on the local corn wine against solitude in the sundown hours. And on December 10, 1937, she wrote a question revealing everything her fame and initial triumph hadn’t settled: “This year I’m afraid will end in failure…and what will I do if I fail?”

Fortune dealt her one more good hand. Just eight days later, her hunters caught a second baby panda. It was carried to the castle on Christmas Eve. She had done it again. They initially named the panda Diana, later Mei-Mei. Twice now she had gone up the mountains after a panda, and twice she had come down carrying one.

Two trips, two pandas, two triumphs. If one wasn’t enough to end the chapter, could two be? Could any number?

The Redemption: Summer 1938

By the time Ruth Harkness sailed for China a third time, Su-Lin was dead.

The world as a whole was on edge as Nazi Germany edged toward war, while global economies still reeled from the Great Depression and public sentiments soured. Following a brief illness and, in spite of the zookeepers’ efforts, Su-Lin died on April 1, 1938 from pneumonia. Harkness, still navigating her own life journey and identity, felt drawn back to China for one more panda.

The trip’s stated mission was already melancholic. She would return to China, as she’d promised the zoo, “to save Mei-Mei from loneliness,” a companion for the panda now alone at Brookfield, and ideally landing the male she had twice promised and twice failed to deliver. In a sense, Brookfield’s original $8,750 had been contractually paid toward this very expedition and its stated prize. She had to go back.

But the world she returned to was no longer the one she had conquered heroically and singularly before. A Chengdu professor had managed to buy a baby from local hunters and deliver it to the Bronx Zoo, which paid three hundred dollars, a small fraction of Su-Lin’s price. Pandas were being hunted and captured at an increasingly alarming rate. Her impossible feat of 1936 was becoming mail-order.

Notably, her third expedition wasn’t even an expedition, merely logistics, because this time Quentin Young had cabled ahead: pandas were already secured and waiting in Chengdu. All she had to do was get there to collect them. So, Ruth booked a flight from New York to San Francisco and then took the Pan Am Clipper across the Pacific to Manila and Hong Kong, finally arriving in Chengdu.

What she found in a borrowed Chengdu garden was Su-Sen, less cuddly baby and more frenetic adolescent. Harkness described the panda as a kindred spirit, fearless, untamable, and “raising hell” in the trees, and repeatedly refusing everything captivity offered. Watching the panda through that hot summer as she typed letters and wrote, Ruth arrived at “an epiphany as strong as the one that had led her to bring a baby bottle on her first trip.” She just couldn’t bring this particular panda back. Instead of shipping Su-Sen to a zoo, she would carry her back up the mountain, to the exact spot where she had been captured, and set her free.

Which brings us back to the rain-soaked cave where our story began. Upon release, Su-Sen didn’t hesitate and defiantly “wandered off without a backward glance,” and Harkness and Wang’s miserable week-long vigil began, watching constantly for the beloved panda yet hoping never to see her again. Her freedom regained, this third panda wouldn’t return.

Here was her second ending on offer: Ruth Harkness ended the panda hunting era she herself had begun, just a year or two before it was formally banned in China and years before the world’s conscience caught up with hers. It was a clean close to the chapter, and arguably a poetically perfect one. She read the phase and moment exactly right: the age of taking pandas was over. Seeing an ending, it turns out, was never her problem. Claiming one as her own was a different act entirely.

On this third trip to China, she could end the goal. What she could not end was the identity built around it. How was it possible that she could author so perfect an ending for Su-Sen, and yet still couldn’t author an ending for herself?

The Tragedy: Late 1938 to 1947

Ruth Harkness had achieved her goal. But having oriented her last few years as a female explorer in search of pandas, the mental shift must have been hard: no target to go after and the felt progress of pursuit no longer pulling. She languished. She came down from the remote panda mountains and returned to Shanghai as the city filled with Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe. A “degenerate frame of mind” was the phrase she put on her mood. In Shanghai she toyed with getting an apartment with writer Emily Hahn (and Hahn’s pet gibbon) and had an intense affair with an Argentine gem merchant. Nothing quite engaged her fully and she lamented, “I’ve simply got to find myself again.”

Wanderlust and the search for what comes next pulled her to Darjeeling and Sikkim, India, where she found a certain contentment in the mountains and Tibetan borderlands, writing “For the first time in the last four years I believe I am approaching the state of being a normal human being.” In December 1938, she rode a pony along a Lhasa trade route up to the Natu La pass (14,200 ft) and spent Christmas Eve “at the end of the world” in a trail bungalow. Paging through old journals and borrowed photos of Lhasa, she found something new to aim at: “1939 at home, the Spring of ‘40 to Lhasa!”

By 1939, she was back in New York and the Midwest as the world went to war and she struggled to plan out her second act. She was now, in Croke’s words, a “benched explorer, virtually bankrupt” and “unable to make a career of writing,” trying for the “humpteenth time” to “start life over again.” She participated in a lecture tour and Chinese-relief benefit, returning home “aimless and broke.” War made the Lhasa goal impossible. Ruth would later diagnose her own condition in print:

“If there is anything in the world a little more useless than another, it is an unemployed explorer… explorers are a poverty-stricken lot who have to go begging at the courts of the mighty… Sometimes they even get to the point where they aren’t quite sure what there is left to discover. Then indeed is the world a bleak and unromantic sphere.”

Ruth’s self-awareness is remarkable even as she struggled to land on her next phase and experienced increasing misfortune.

In early 1940 she substituted her target again following a lunch with her agent Jane Hardy where they “concocted an expedition to South America.” And by February 23, 1940, she sailed for Peru. She couldn’t hide what was actually calling her though, as The New York Times reported her purpose was “to study the descendants of the Incas for comparison with the inhabitants of Tibet.” Was this a real re-engagement or was this her Lhasa goal pursued via Peru?

Her two-year stint in Peru unfolded as another slow drift, first in a Lima pension scene she called “a rather elaborate nothing,” and later inland in a primitive thatched “chalet” costing under a dollar a month and having no doors or windows. She lived on tortillas and beans, passing evenings playing rummy and drinking whatever local booze was available, still hunting the substitute for the goal she hadn’t let go of: a “Peruvian panda” that did not exist. Malaria and heavy drinking wore her down further. Her book and her letters told those same months in two different registers. In print, she reached for meaning: “the whole thing became the pursuit of destiny.” To her friend Perkie, she confessed: “I drink for oblivion…In fact, I am having a drink right now.” Even mid-oblivion, she could still name the trade she kept choosing: “I might not like that sort of life if there were no goal to be reached.”

The years after ran quieter. Pangoan Diary was published in 1942, and it “contained none of the intensity and joy” of her first book. Her writing career did not recapture the heights of years before. By 1944 the world’s most famous explorer was writing recipe-and-travel columns for Gourmet, “Saludos” from Peru, then “Mexican Mornings” from a village in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Her health did not rebound and the drinking deepened. By her own admission, she had spent her life “wandering the lonely world. Searching sometimes one thing, sometimes another. Often it seems to me that I have lost my destiny and am hunting to find it again.”

Here she was with her third ending on offer, except this time it wasn’t an on- or off-ramp but a path she was already standing inside and living: writer, columnist, traveler. The next chapter was already a fact. Pangoan Diary was her second book; the Gourmet columns were a living; the village in Mexico was an independent life on her own terms. What appears to have never happened was acceptance. What held her back from naming this her chapter and her settled identity? Was it the haunting of her previous peak? The inability to move on? Or the overall diminishment by comparison?

She lived this ending for nine years yet never once claimed it. In her own telling she remained an unemployed explorer, never the re-employed writer. In July 1947, weeks after a suicide attempt, she traveled alone to Pittsburgh and checked into the William Penn Hotel near midnight in a humid thunderstorm. Two nights later she was found dead in the bath. She was forty-six.

The first ending she declined, the financial pull too strong and return to China too enticing. The second she authored, but for someone else, Su-Sen, the free-spirited adolescent panda she returned. The third she lived inside for nine years and with a host of accomplishments and stories to tell but seemingly without ever accepting that it was hers. A chapter she was squarely inside but looking longingly back at the one that was already closed.

What does it take to author an ending? Or just be content and say yes to the chapter you’re already in?

Living the Question: How Do You End a Chapter?

There is no tidy answer to that question, not for Ruth, not for any of us. The skills of pursuit don’t come with skills for endings; there is rarely a clean move or a ready replacement for the goal that organized us. That endings are messy is obvious. What’s less obvious: the messiness is not a misreading or a failure. It’s an accurate perception. We’ve lost the target that oriented us and are awash in conflicting emotions.

We conflate three different states at the end of a pursuit. Unfinished is about the work: tasks left undone (and there are always tasks left undone). Unclosed is about the story: a chapter completed but never ended, no line drawn, no next chapter named. Unresolved is about the question: the ambition that never got a fair test, an honest try. Each aches differently. Unfinished nags. Unclosed lingers. Unresolved haunts.

Ruth’s after held a bit of all three. Her work was unfinished, because there were always more expeditions, more articles, more logistics. But that was in a way the trivial ache. Her chapter was unclosed. Completed, celebrated but never ended. A decade later she was still the panda lady. And her deepest question stayed unresolved. Who might Explorer Harkness have been with backing, peace, and a fair second act? That last haunting state and pain we might call counterfactual grief, the mourning for a version of yourself that never got tested. The what-if-only.

The after-phase operates as a form of ecological collapse: you no longer have your environment, habits or tasks to be completed. You no longer have the goal nor the self oriented by that target. You lack confidence and clarity, and you struggle to decide. Your self-narrative has lost its plot. It’s just over and you now enter a realm of indeterminacy.

You might have ended on an “I failed,” an “I finished and felt empty,” or an “I never got a fair shot,” but ambiguity imbues all of these states when you realize something harsher: What if the goal-framed version of me who I liked best and felt most alive only existed inside a reality I can no longer return to? I’m now wearing a personal identity whose clothing I no longer fit into, visible only in memory by looking back.

We all inhabit some unclaimed chapters in our life. The painter who calls themselves an artist but has stopped picking up the brush. The zombie founder who can’t let go of the title. The athlete who can’t say “former.” The panda-woman with no panda left to hunt.

Closing a chapter is harder when the next thing is still unnamed. It feels more comfortable to stick with the habitual reference of the self that was, even if it’s over. As a founder and venture builder, I often can’t help wanting a retry or reroll on something I already tried and failed. When I left a peak-career moment at Techstars in China — having established corporate partnerships and thriving startup programs but failing to stand up a full startup accelerator — the pull to repeat and recreate that goal was hard to resist. I chased backers and replacement accelerator programs in Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Singapore and Los Angeles. In retrospect, I was hunting my own Peruvian panda.

The after-phase isn’t solved; it’s navigated. The lack of an obvious answer isn’t a cop out but a recognition of ambiguity as an honest state we enter with our goals. Navigating looks less like an answer and more like a reflective practice: naming your state, accepting the identity conflict, choosing anyway and beginning to tell your new story.

The Unemployed Explorer and the Hunt After the Hunt

So, how do you go from being the greatest in your field to a more humble new beginning? A new chapter without feeling haunted, or pulled to recreate what has already moved on and away from us and is impossible to remake?

In the summer of 1938, on that cold and wet mountain in Western China, Harkness’s final captured panda walked off into the bamboo forest without a backward glance. Su-Sen became what Ruth had wished for, “once more the gay-hearted comrade of all the lusty mountain gods.” Ruth walked down and spent nine years glancing back. She had authored for her kindred spirit the exact ending she couldn’t grant herself.

Nearly a decade later in 1947, Harkness declared that “I had found no niche for myself in the busy world I had left behind.” She had done many remarkable things in her after-peak era, but none of it satisfied her, an ache compounded by a war that had closed her China, thin finances, and a world with little room for a woman explorer’s second act. So she was still, perhaps forever, “hunting to find it again.” A ghost goal retreating into a past that she, the explorer, could no longer explore — with no new goal strong enough to pull her out of the past’s gravity well.

Every ending is one we take, one we author, or one that takes us.

Which of your backwards-facing chapters lies still open? And what would it take to author a new one — or finally claim the one you’re already in?

The Baby Giant Panda, Carrick & Evans, 1938 -- the source of most photographs here

Goal Pursuit Series (my posts):

Is This the Long Middle or the Desperate End?: the companion essay on Greely’s expedition and phase ambiguity during the pursuit
Multi-Stage Goal Pursuits: the Rubicon model of goal phases
Stuck in the Middle: midpoint motivation collapse and the action crisis
The Ostrich Problem: why we avoid checking progress on goals we care about
The Science of Goals: an overview of the goal-science literature

Sources

Written:

The Lady and the Panda by Vicki Constantine Croke (2005): the definitive retelling this essay draws on, built from Harkness’s letters
The Lady and the Panda: An Adventure by Ruth Harkness (1938): her own memoir, borrowable at the Internet Archive
Pangoan Diary by Ruth Harkness (1942): her Peru memoir and the after-phase in her own words, free at the Internet Archive
The Baby Giant Panda by Ruth Harkness (1938): her short account of Su-Lin’s journey, free at the Internet Archive

Photographs:

Most of the photographs here are scans from Ruth Harkness’s own book, The Baby Giant Panda (New York: Carrick & Evans, 1938), digitized by the Internet Archive from the State Library of Ohio copy. The book is believed to be in the public domain: US works published between 1930 and 1963 required a copyright renewal in their twenty-eighth year, and no renewal appears on record for the title or the author. Two exceptions. The portrait of Harkness holding Su Lin comes from Wikimedia Commons, where it is tagged public domain. “Good-by,” the photograph of her at the crate, carries a Chicago Tribune credit on the plate, and its rights are separate from the book’s. Several plates in the book name other photographers, among them Lotte Jacobi, Wide World Photos, Eastman Kodak, Bryant Haliday and Foujita. None of those appear in this post. Images have been cropped out of the page scans to remove captions and scan edges, then resized. The Commons portrait was also desaturated to neutral and level-corrected, since the source had a blue cast.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with structural scaffolding, editing prose, surfacing source material from prior notes, and proof reading. The cover image was designed by the author.

What If Daily Progress Is the Real Motivator? Book Notes on The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile & Steven Kramer

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What actually motivates you to do your work and show up every day? Is it the paycheck? Accolades? Something else?

If you asked managers, the most common answers tend to be recognition, pay, or pressure. But what really keeps us going when we sit down at the studio or the keyboard? What if management and leadership have it wrong on what motivates their employees?

According to a landmark study, the answer was none of these and surprisingly simple:

“Of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meaningful work.” (p. 72)

Published in 2011, The Progress Principle by Amabile and Kramer is one of my favorite and most recommended books. Whether you are a worker, manager, or leader, the book argues that our productive and creative lives should be built on the progress principle (making progress on meaningful work), and that we should prioritize removing the obstacles that cause the opposite of progress: setbacks at work.

There is a strong overlap between this lived experience of making progress and a wide range of my own work on self-tracking, quantified self experiments, and productivity practices. I’ve been quietly managing my goals, projects, and tasks based on this finding for more than a decade. Reading this book finally gave me the vocabulary to put it into words.

Here are the book’s key ideas that resonated most with me as well as my book notes and a few takeaways.

My Quick Take Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I rated this book a 5 out of 5 on Goodreads.
Would I recommend it? Definitely. This is one of my most recommended books for anyone pursuing peak performance on their own or for their teams.
Would I read it again? Yes, this is a book I plan to pick up again, though I’d love to see a companion book looking at making progress in a wider range of scenarios like art or startups.
What was missing? The book is manager-centric and misses out on the more universal application (like flow) that is applicable to solo creators too.

What I Got Out of This Book

When I read this book in 2021, I was in the midst of several ongoing work and creative projects at the time, sadly most of which would fail. Emotionally, it can be hard to not see what you are pursuing in terms of a binary outcome: success or failure.

I had spent several months writing a book tentatively titled The Science of Goals, focusing on the operational side of goal pursuit. Rather than relegating goals to setting and final outcomes, I was arguing that it was essential to set mid-term goals, track your progress using self-tracking technology, and do regular reviews and reflection on your pursuit, progress, and setbacks. My argument was that by instrumenting and quantifying your goals and visualizing the data through dashboards, you could better sustain your effort, choose your next move, and eventually reach your goals.

As the first draft manuscript deadline loomed, Amabile’s book stuck particularly hard, because it gave an emotional and lived experience to back up the operational and practice-heavy approach I was advocating for. While I eventually got caught up with other projects and didn’t finish or publish the book (writing a book is hard!), a strong throughline remained with me in the years ahead. While we should construct our in-the-moment work lives on flow, we should also capture our progress and make it tangible in ways that remind us of the progress we are making, because it’s the lived experience of daily progress on meaningful work that motivates us.

Background: Teresa Amabile, the Diary Study and Our Inner Work Life

Teresa Amabile is an American academic at Harvard Business School. She is known for her research on creativity and motivation in organizations. With her co-author Steven Kramer, they collected, over several years, what would become one of the largest datasets of its kind on the lived, in-the-moment experience of workers: roughly 12,000 daily diary entries from 26 project teams. Unlike surveys or interviews, the diary method captures data on emotions, perceptions, and motivations as they happened, rather than self-reported memories or interpretations.

From this data, they discovered that our work and creative experience is not a static state but a dynamic system that shapes our performance. They call this our “inner work life” and define it as the confluence of perceptions, emotions, and motivations that we experience as we react to and make sense of the events of our workday.

Our Best Work Days Happen When We Make Progress

The most striking finding from the diary study was that workers’ best days had the most reported events where they were making progress. By contrast, their worst days were the reverse and more associated with setbacks at work.

The numbers showed an almost mirror-image pattern:

On best days, 76% of diary entries reported progress; only 13% reported setbacks
On worst days, only 25% reported progress; 67% reported setbacks
28% of small events triggered big emotional reactions, far more than participants expected

Creativity was also better. Workers in positive moods were 50% more likely to have a creative idea on those days.

While the data showed progress as the dominant factor on best vs worst days for employees, managers who were surveyed on what they thought motivated their employees picked recognition as the most important factor and ranked “supporting progress” as dead last among five candidate factors.

Progress in Meaningful Work as THE Daily Motivator

“Most people have strong intrinsic motivation to do their work, at least early in their careers. That motivation exists, and continues, until something gets in the way.” (Amabile & Kramer, p. 34)

Most workers are intrinsically motivated to work and naturally want to do good work. They don’t need external motivation or micromanagement. They need obstacles and blockers removed, because while setbacks tend to result in bad work days, it’s daily progress on work that matters to them that tends to result in their best work days, creativity, and peak performance.

Importantly, the bar for “meaningful work” is lower than most readers might assume:

“To be meaningful, your work doesn’t have to have profound importance to society… What matters is whether you perceive your work as contributing value to something or someone who matters (even your team, yourself, or your family).” (p. 88)

In our careers and work lives, we often emphasize the importance of finding purpose and deeper meaning. In our goals, we focus on achievements and the final outcome. But we can miss the journey itself, getting depressed by setbacks and the long middle along the way.

As I work on my startup app or finish my next album, I have to remind myself regularly about the progress I’m making, despite how much work is still ahead. The lived experience of making progress on meaningful work might be a healthier, more sustainable way to live as we work toward those goals. Each step matters and can ultimately help you get there in your own time and in your own way.

Self-Aware Progress Tracking Practice: My Lived Application of the Progress Principle

As someone who obsessed and wrote extensively about quantified self and self-tracking for many years, it’s remarkable to me to see how my tracking practices evolved over time in a way that aligns with the progress principle. This book gave me the vocabulary even though my practice came before. Re-reading this book and writing this review has sharpened how I see my own self-aware goal pursuit practices.

Interestingly, individual health and productivity experiments (like tracking my mood or poop) were one-offs because they didn’t empower me in my daily progress practices. By contrast, several areas have evolved in ways that are central to my own internal operating system.

Here are a few:

Morning Pages as Personal Diary Study: I journal at least 2-3 times per week. Besides being a brain dump for writing, it helps me record my inner work life events with clients and as a solo-creator. Reading them and orienting my day based on them helps me see invisible patterns, remove blockers, and navigate sense-making in the moment.
Weekly Reviews: Reviewing and Tracking Progress: David Allen’s Getting Things Done taught me a few simple organizational practices that I have applied in my life and that continue to fuel my approach to productivity, task tracking, and weekly reviews. My data-driven weekly review remains a cornerstone habit because of its usefulness and meaningfulness as an operating system. By tracking and pulling my most impactful data, I can look back on my week to see the progress I made, where I got stuck, and how to iterate and plan ahead.
Writing Sprint Campaigns and Session Tracker: Maintaining a writing habit is hard, especially since research-backed essays take a lot of time and often multiple sessions. So, as I described in a recent post, I started to carve out time in my calendar and record the small wins from each session. The end result is sustained progress and built-up momentum resulting in more published blog posts.
Producer Pipelines: Small Regular Moves That Move the Work Forward: As a music producer working on my next album, the principle shows up often. My recent Producer Pipelines post named what working producers do without realizing it: design their own systems for advancing tracks one decision at a time. At Playback Pilot, one of the product’s internal north star metrics is “making moves,” which is Karl Weick’s small wins applied to music. Having a track in a pipeline means that the move you make today gets you closer to a finished song.

This idea pairs naturally with flow, which I’ve written about. Flow happens IN the work while the Progress Principle lives BETWEEN our moments of work. Both make you feel good and are intrinsic motivators that emerge from doing meaningful work, not from external rewards or recognition.

Concluding Thought: How to Live the Progress Principle

“People are more creative when they are driven primarily by intrinsic motivators: the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself.” (p. 52)

While the book itself tends to feel manager-centric, the core takeaways are universally applicable and can be integrated and lived by each of us every day.

Notice your daily progress, and write it down somewhere. We tend to forget what we did and remember what we didn’t. We overweigh setbacks and underweigh the wins. By tracking and writing something down, you make your progress visible and tangible.
Lower the bar on “meaningful.” The progress you make day to day doesn’t have to change the world. It just has to be meaningful to you. If you are making moves that get you closer to your album, your blog post, your side project, your whatever, that’s all that matters.
Engineer small wins into your day. Feeling stuck or having a bad day? Seek out a small opportunity that delivers a small win. It could be one sentence written, one drop in the bucket, one session logged. Just do it and call it a progress win.

At the end of the day, living a life centered on progress is about recognition of the meaningful steps rather than measurement of the whole. Frequency of showing up beats magnitude of impact.

As Amabile and Kramer put it:

“Progress lives in the everyday, not just in quarterly reports or milestone checkpoints.” (p. 184)

[Bonus] The Reflection Journey Template I Built From This Book

Check out the Reflection Journey I created based on this book.

Inspired by Teresa Amabile, the essence of the “Progress Principle” is finding joy and motivation in our daily achievements, no matter how small. Celebrating these moments and wins can dramatically improve your workday, motivation, and overall happiness. Small wins can lead us to big dreams. Let’s harness the power of progress by reflecting on our daily achievements and the steps we take towards our larger goals.

What progress did you make today or recently towards a goal or task that felt meaningful?
How did or does your progress make you feel?
What is one or two small yet achievable steps you can take next to continue this progress?

➡ Try it at StayReflective.com

More from me on goals, progress, and flow:

The Ostrich Problem: Why do we avoid checking our goal progress? — The flip side of the progress principle: if felt progress is the #1 motivator, then avoiding progress information is how we quietly starve our own inner work life.
Stuck in the Middle: Why Motivation Collapses Halfway to Your Goal — The midpoint slump as a failure of felt progress, and design moves to restore small wins.
Is This the Long Middle or the Desperate End? — Reading where you are in a long-arc pursuit when progress is ambiguous; no-regret moves as partial-credit progress. The daily-scale fuel here meets multi-year-scale uncertainty.
80 Hours, 9 Posts: What a 7-Week Writing Sprint Taught Me — Live evidence of small daily wins compounding into shipped work.
Tracking Flow — The sibling intrinsic motivator that operates IN the work, where the Progress Principle lives BETWEEN work moments.

Companion book reviews:

Slow Productivity by Cal Newport — Natural pace and McPhee’s “drop in the bucket” as the Progress Principle in practice.
Finish by Jon Acuff — Perfectionism as the enemy of finishing; cutting the goal in half to restore momentum.
Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal — Feeling good as the fuel for productive work, not the reward; the emotional sibling to the Progress Principle.
The Courage to Be Disliked by Kishimi & Koga — Meaning through contribution to others; a sibling to “meaningful work” as motivator.

The original idea:

Karl Weick, “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems” (1984) — The conceptual ancestor of the progress principle.

References

Amabile, T., & Kramer, S. (2011). The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Harvard Business Press.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with quote organization, smart note extraction, and structural editing. Images were generated by Google’s NotebookLM.

Is This the Long Middle or the Desperate End? What Greely's Arctic Expedition Teaches Us about the Uncertainty of Goal Pursuit

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

October 1883. Cape Sabine. The Greely Expedition has just reached land after fifty days adrift on the ice. Twenty-five men, still believing rescue is possible, build a makeshift shelter when a two-man scout crew returns with a letter: their relief ship, the Proteus, crushed by ice, has sunk. The scouts find three small food caches — enough for only a few weeks. Lieutenant Greely halves the rations. Winter closes in. Sergeant Brainard later writes of this period: “This constant expectancy of death, at first a sharp, dreadful trial, gradually passed into a vague and deadening feeling.”

Sergeant William Cross dies first, succumbing to scurvy and malnutrition. They shrimp the bay for scraps and eat moldy dog biscuits. They continue to weaken. More die. By the final weeks, what little remaining food they have starts disappearing; one man is accused of theft and executed. Twenty-five men left Newfoundland in the summer of 1881, and up to this point, they had not just survived but thrived. They peer south, watching for rescue. None of them know yet which phase they’re in. The long middle? Or the desperate end?

Stuck in the Middle assumes you know it’s the middle. For any long-arc project or goal — an Arctic expedition, an album, a startup — the harder question asks: Is this the middle, or is this the end? Greely’s crew faced that question for three years. So does any founder or creative deep in the heart of their goal pursuit.

The hardest part of a long-arc project isn’t the middle. It’s not knowing whether you’re in the middle or already at the end. The answer can’t be found through introspection, felt sense, or even data. Because you’re inside the pursuit, the same evidence fits both stories. You might be in a middle phase rising toward a peak. You might be in a middle phase collapsing toward an end. From inside, they look identical. Only time tells them apart.

The Greely Expedition: What We Know Now

As Buddy Levy retells in Labyrinth of Ice, the Greely Expedition was a multi-year scientific mission to take continual measurements from the Arctic and explore.

In July 1881, Lieutenant Greely and his crew of 24 set out aboard the Proteus for Lady Franklin Bay. They arrived in August, unloaded 350 tons of supplies, and built Fort Conger — their base for a two-year scientific mission.

The first year was a kind of Arctic flourishing. The men took continual measurements with the most advanced instruments of the age. They celebrated holidays, ran a short-lived newspaper, hosted lectures, made sledge explorations. The hunters led by local Greenlander Jens Edward kept them in a healthy supply of fresh meat too. Capping what had been one of the most ambitious Arctic expeditions to date, in May 1882, a small party under Lockwood and including Greenlander Fred Christiansen reached a new Farthest North — extending the known coast of Greenland by a hundred miles.

The men of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, photographed before departure in 1881 (U.S. Army Signal Corps)

In the summer of 1882, the crew hit their first patch of bad luck. The expected resupply boat Neptune left late from St. John’s, and ice prevented her from reaching the bay. As planned, supplies were dropped 250 miles south at Cape Sabine. As the days shortened, the men continued their measurements as the monotony wore on and tensions grew. Their eyes drifted south, watching for sails that didn’t come.

By the summer of 1883, the relief ship Proteus still hadn’t arrived. Greely ordered Fort Conger abandoned — along with the dogs and most of their supplies. The crew had to venture south across the frozen seas if they hoped to escape. Using boats, sledges, and manpower, they inched south, often at the mercy of the ice floes. Seven weeks later, they reached land.

The relief ship Proteus on the morning of 23 July 1883, crushed by the ice that same evening (NOAA) · Two men with a sled before a large ice formation · The six survivors with their Navy rescuers, photographed at Upernavik, Greenland, 2–3 July 1884 (U.S. Navy / NH 1608)

And then came Camp Clay, the eight months already seen at the start of this post.

On June 22, 1884, Commander Schley’s Navy rescue mission reached Cape Sabine. Seven men were still alive. Six survived the voyage home — Corporal Ellison succumbed to frostbite during the return. Of the twenty-five men who left Newfoundland three years earlier, six came home.

Seas of Ambiguity: Three Moments of Navigating Phase Identification

From time to time, Greely’s crew must have asked themselves some version of this question: Where am I at in this story? Is this the long middle or have I arrived at the desperate end? Iced-in and lacking a means of long-distance communication, three times across three years Greely had to read their phase with incomplete information. Each time, the wrong read could have killed them.

August 1882.

As their first full year at Fort Conger in the Arctic ended and the likelihood decreased of the resupply boat’s arrival, the crew knew they needed to stay the course with plenty of supplies, steady leadership and no major mishaps or fatalities so far. They continued to take measurements, explore and hunt.

The missing ship was a setback, not a verdict on their fate. They had a year of contingency built into the original plan, and supplies for two more years. Greely navigated social unrest, required daily physical exercise even during the long winter, and encouraged hobbies. The next summer’s resupply would surely come. They rightly read 1882 as the middle of an expedition, not the end. Another boat would attempt to reach them the following year.

Should they have worried more? Adjusted their planning sooner? Or stayed the course?

From inside, with the same evidence, they could just as easily have read it as the beginning of the end. They didn’t. Looking back, we know they were right.

August 1883.

By August, Greely had to choose. The Proteus had not come. No signal, no message. The season was ending, and ice was forming. Their contingency plan called for retreat south to the supply caches at Cape Sabine. The plan dictated abandoning Fort Conger.

They could have stayed, as a few of the men wanted. They had supplies for another year, a fortified shelter, routines that had carried them through two winters. They could hunt. In the moment, both readings in these seas of phase ambiguity held weight.

Sergeant Brainard captured the deliberation in his journal:

“We have little to do except observe the channel, either for a boat or for the opportune moment when our little band must strike out independently to the south. If no vessel arrives, it is our only alternative.”

They were a military crew, and, in spite of some quiet dissent, Greely ordered them to leave. The decision was irreversible. Once the ice closed behind them, Fort Conger was gone and they were trapped on the icy sea.

Had they chosen right or wrong? Was this another long middle or a fatal choice that would be their end?

Looking back, we still don’t know which read was right. Historians have argued for a century whether Greely’s retreat saved his men or doomed them. Both sides chose with the same evidence. Neither could be sure.

Winter 1883-84.

By their third sunless winter in the Arctic, the crew was holed up at Camp Clay (where this post started). Supplies dwindled. Health declined. Morale thinned. They peered south each day for sails that didn’t come. Men were dying.

What the opening scene didn’t show was Greely’s choices. He halved the rations again. He sent supply parties out into the bleak wastes for caches he couldn’t be sure existed. He held the command structure together, though he loosened it slightly to consider more perspectives. Fewer and fewer men were physically capable of leaving their camp.

Were they still in a long middle, waiting for a rescue that might yet come? Or had they arrived at the desperate end as most of the men must have now believed?

Even then, the few men with the energy still found moments of companionship, caring and sometimes beauty as they looked out at the raw nature of the north they were living in.

In the moment, both readings on their future fit. The situation’s deterioration likely meant less and less optimism. Looking back at Greely’s expedition doesn’t resolve the question. In fact, it splits it. For six men, Camp Clay turned out to have been a long middle that ended in rescue. For nineteen others, it was the desperate end. Which phase you were in only becomes clear once the story has unfolded.

Living the Question: Long Middle or Desperate End?

Whether you’re in the middle of a long arc or at the desperate end is hard to face and harder to live with. From inside the maze, you can’t tell if you’re on a route that exits or one that doesn’t. The clues are few. The question itself, from inside, is unanswerable. It all feels and looks the same. But whether it’s a middle or an end changes how you should act. Should you assume you’re nearly there and persist? Or accept failure and pivot?

English cairn on P. E. Cary Island, July 1881. Records left under stone for whoever came next

I’ve lived through this question at many moments of my life, including the present one. As a music producer, I’ve spent over 200 hours spanning 8+ months working on my next album and it’s still not done. As a startup founder and product builder, I’ve spent over 6 months building a product and growing a business that has only gotten 100 or so installs and a dozen or so active users. The glacial pace of progress, the constant pressure of the middle phase, and the uncertainty of reaching the end are hard to live with. The tension of these moments can be agonizing. Many weeks I struggle, hardly act, doubt, and want to give up. We must live the question by recognizing the unanswerable nature of the situation we are in AND act anyway.

As humans we tend toward optimism and assume we’ll succeed in the challenges we take on. And yet we also build contingency plans, exit strategies, excuses, and optionality for when things don’t work out, just like Greely and his crew did.

The science of goal pursuit offers mental models for navigating any long arc.

You don’t just set goals but rather pursue them through decision points, multiple stages and emotions. Model of Action Phases vividly labels the transition from deliberation to action as crossing the Rubicon.
Rarely is a goal pursuit linear. An action crisis describes the lulls where doubt spins and motivation falters, which can happen because we aren’t making progress, aren’t feeling aligned with our goal anymore, or because we are stuck in the middle.
Ostrich instinct labels when and why we avoid checking progress and data that might tell us where we are.
There are strategies for setting goals and a body of work on navigating the long arc once you’ve named it.

But what most of this literature misses is the diagnostic itself: How do you know what phase you’re in? These typical goal techniques assume we know or can figure out what phase we are in. They don’t offer a way to live the question and make no-regret moves when we are in the midst of phase ambiguity.

Principle 1: You usually can’t tell from inside which phase you’re in. Data from inside doesn’t tell you which situation you’re facing. Only the future disambiguates. Even quitting doesn’t tell you if you should have persisted, because quitting gives you no knowledge of the phase you were in or the contours of the maze you were inside. You simply stopped pursuing or exploring. Greely held the same structured, optimistic posture through Year 1 and Year 3. He had to assume they’d be rescued. Both situations presented the same face. The posture happened to align and fit one but not the other. The verdict only exists now, looking back. It was never available to them in the moment.

Principle 2: Wrong-phase strategy actively harms. Startup founder culture prescribes two confident, opposite phase-reads: never give up and kill it fast. When things are hard, grind culture says push through. The lean-startup version says kill it off, pivot fast, move fast and break things. Both are high-confidence phase-reads dressed up as best practices and virtues. Both ignore the diagnostic problem that from the inside, you can’t tell which phase you’re in. Humility and sitting with the uncertainty are the actual moves.

Principle 3: Do the things that pay off in both phases — the no-regret moves. Sometimes we have to stop trying to resolve the unresolvable or answer the unanswerable. We must resolve to act in ways that are useful and meaningful in either situation. Seek out and embrace no-regret moves.

We saw Greely’s no-regret moves at Camp Clay — the halved rations, the supply parties, the held command, the moments of companionship and beauty. None of them resolved his diagnostic question. They earned their keep regardless.

For a founder, you should talk to your users, ship small, iterate in a way that gives you more data and signals, protect your runway, maintain a family and social life, and protect your health.

At the meta level, the pursuit itself can be no-regret. As a product builder, I embrace the craft of building. My latest product, Playback Pilot has taught me Flutter on a local-first stack, designing tools for human empowerment, and the craft of navigating the arc of creative finishing. Whether or not it works as a venture thesis and business, the skills, the craft, the building, and the philosophy compound regardless of whether it succeeds or fails. Furthermore, as a music producer, building this app has made me more self-aware of my creative process and how to support my middle and finishing phases. Most of our goals should be worthy of doing as an activity regardless of the outcome.

At the Farthest North

Greely’s crew reached their Farthest North in May 1882. Lockwood and his small party extended the known coast of Greenland by a hundred miles. Along with their continued measurements and photo record, they achieved and celebrated one of their stated mission goals. As they lamented the non-arrival of their resupply and later rescue, they continued to take measurements, explore, map and make more discoveries, including new fjords and ice passages. They were having the kind of year an expedition lives for. None of them knew this was the peak of the whole arc. None of them knew or assumed that two years later, nineteen of them would be dead.

One of those men was Sgt. George W. Rice, the expedition’s photographer, who took nearly every photograph in this post. A Canadian civilian given a sergeant’s rank, he was the first person to photograph this stretch of the Arctic and made over a hundred images of it. On April 9, 1884, he died of exhaustion and starvation while out after a cache, ten weeks before the relief ship arrived. The record of the good year was made by a man who turned out to be in the desperate end.

Natives and hut at Proven, Greenland, July 1881 · Bellot Island, expedition stores in the foreground, August 1881 · Musk cattle killed on Mt. Cartmel, August 1881, the season of plenty · A man before the mountain · Chattel's Grotto in Watercourse Ravine, October 1882 · The ice foot

The diagnostic problem is that you can recognize an achievement when you reach it, but what you can’t see is its context — where it sits in the longer arc. You can’t see your peak as the peak when you’re at it. You can’t see your middle as the middle when you’re in it. You can’t know it’s your end until it’s already behind you. This is the universal truth of any long-arc pursuit.

The hardest part of a long-arc project isn’t the middle. It’s not knowing whether you’re in the middle or already at the end.

The goal-pursuit literature assumes that you can answer that question, that you can know what phase or situation you are in, and that you can match your strategy and actions to your phase. Greely’s expedition and crew teach us that diagnosis and goal phase identification are nearly impossible from the inside. As goal pursuers, creatives and startup founders, we often seek reassuring signals or comforting platitudes to navigate similarly unanswerable questions.

Is this the long middle or the desperate end? From inside, the same evidence fits both stories. You can’t predict. Only the future disambiguates. Until then, we need to pace ourselves, take a stance that accepts uncertainty and doesn’t depend on the answer, and act in a way that works for either.

In a long-arc pursuit, rarely do we know when we’ve reached our farthest north, at least not from inside and especially when we are in the middle of the journey. Floating situationally and emotionally in these seas of uncertainty, our best and often only moves are the ones that pay off either way, while we let time do the rest.

Goal Pursuit Series (my posts):

The Unemployed Explorer: the companion essay on Ruth Harkness, who reached her goal, and the phase after the win
Multi-Stage Goal Pursuits: the Rubicon model of goal phases, from deliberate to plan to act to evaluate
Stuck in the Middle: midpoint motivation collapse and how to design for it
The Ostrich Problem: why we avoid checking progress on goals we care about
The Science of Goals: an overview of the goal-science literature
Producer Pipelines: on the Playback Pilot blog, the music producer’s version of phase identification

Books on finishing and long arcs:

Finish by Jon Acuff: perfectionism as the enemy of finishing, my review
Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery: Emma Gatewood’s solo Appalachian Trail hike at 67, another long-arc story of uncertain outcome and quiet endurance
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport: natural pace and doing fewer things, the marathon-pacing register for long horizons, my review

Sources

Written:

Labyrinth of Ice by Buddy Levy (2019): the narrative retelling of the Greely Expedition this post draws on
Three Years of Arctic Service by Adolphus Greely (1886): his own account, free at the Internet Archive

Photographs:

Every historical photograph in this post is in the public domain. Most were taken by Sgt. George W. Rice (1855–1884), the expedition’s photographer, and are held by the Library of Congress. The relief ship Proteus is from NOAA. The six survivors aboard USS Thetis is a U.S. Navy photograph, NH 1608, from the Naval History and Heritage Command. All are reproduced via Wikimedia Commons. The Proteus photograph has been desaturated to match the others, which are black and white. No other alterations have been made beyond cropping and resizing.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with structural scaffolding, editing prose, surfacing source material from prior notes, and proof reading. The cover image was generated with Gemini.

What if I Had to Only Choose One Thing? Book Notes and Reflections on Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How do you sustain creative output without burning out? How do you create high quality work and art at a sustainable pace?

It’s mid-May, my activity level has been running hot on multiple fronts for months, and I recently finished Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, a book on how to do less and still have meaningful, high-impact output. There is a certain personal irony in reflecting on this book’s core concepts when I spent 212 hours of computer time in a single month and have 4-5 active projects in the queue.

Newport’s earlier books, Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, are obvious arguments — most knowledge workers will nod and agree. Slow Productivity is doing something harder: making a case for the productive artist working in a crowded space of competing interests, and pushing back against the grind as the only path to meaningful output.

My Quick Take Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I rated this book a 5 out of 5 on Goodreads.
Would I recommend it? — Yes, definitely would recommend this book since it offers meaningful ways to reframe how you pursue goals over the long haul.
Would I read it again? — I don’t plan to re-read this, since I feel like the big ideas were obvious and intuitive in a single read and there weren’t a ton of templates or reflection activities worth revisiting.
What was missing? I felt like Newport could have been a bit more vulnerable and shared a bit more of his own journey with burnout, pseudo-productivity and even what he struggles with as a writer and professor.

What I Got Out of This Book

In April 2026, I logged 212 hours of computer time or 7h per day including the weekend. Was I being productive or just busy?

Diagnosis: The Pseudo-Productivity Trap

Historically, it has been straightforward to quantify productive output with input, especially when output is defined by a tangible outcome and obvious step-by-step process. In manufacturing, Ford’s Model T production line defined a process, iterated on each step, and oriented around the measurable goal of units produced per hour. Agriculture requires the visible activity involving tilling, planting, weeding, etc., which results in the visible material output defined by bushels per acre.

By contrast, the productivity of knowledge work is difficult to objectively quantify. The work product itself is variable. The creation process rarely is repeatable nor definable in any step-by-step manner. So, how do you measure and signal you are productive when your input and output are no longer intuitive and obvious?

The visible-activity heuristic has become the proxy for perceived productivity by both managers and workers alike. When you can’t measure output cleanly nor define what it takes in terms of steps and time input, looking busy becomes the proxy for being viewed as valuable and productive. The rise of communication and project management tools, like email, Slack, etc, has made it possible to “visibly signal your busyness with minimal effort” (Newport, p. 18), which has further entrenched this tendency.

The central issue or villain in Newport’s book is Pseudo-Productivity which he defines as: the “use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.” (p. 18).

Pseudo-Productivity becomes a trap on multiple levels. Performing work and doing the actual work gets decoupled. Companies end up in an “always on” urgency-based, performative work culture that assumes more hours lead to better results. Talking about work in endless chat threads, meetings and email chains seems to matter more than the work itself or what we produce. Over time, companies and their employees end up with exhausting overload and burnout, partially attributed to the need to be seen as present and busy, while we become misaligned from our actual priorities and what’s most important in our jobs. We become burdened by more maintenance overhead, make less meaningful progress, and ship less impactful work.

In my own work and creative life, I’m fortunate to have very little busy work or time spent in meetings, chat or email. In fact, of April’s 212h, a mere 5% was on Communication & Scheduling while a remarkable 38% was on Software Development and 33% on Design & Composition (including music). 71% of my computer time was actual building and making.

By the standard measure, I have avoided the pseudo-productivity trap. I’m productive and focused. I’m not burned out by the busyness but instead I’m an entrepreneur and builder running close to the ceiling of my actual productive cognitive capacity, both in terms of time input and potential creative output. So why am I still feeling overloaded, facing borderline burnout, and increasingly misaligned and cluttered? Because I’m trying to work on too many things.

Newport’s Prescription: Slow Productivity in a Nutshell

Newport’s definition of Slow Productivity is a “philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner.”

Against the backdrop of pseudo-productivity and even my own productive overload, he offers three principles as the prescription:

Do fewer things
Work at a natural pace
Obsess over quality

Each is load-bearing by itself while together they form a coherent answer to the trap of pseudo-productivity and can aid us in navigating a meaningfully productive life at a sustainable pace and load.

The Four Words I’m Carrying Out

But here are the four words I’m actually carrying out of this book:

Do Fewer Things. Higher Quality. Finish. Don’t Overthink.

Two of these are Newport’s specific wording, while the other two are what he’s pointing at without quite saying.

Do Fewer Things

“Working on fewer things can paradoxically produce more value in the long term: overload generates an untenable quantity of nonproductive overhead.” (p. 73)

For Newport, doing fewer things entails a principle of structural reduction. He argues that we should be limiting at three different scales — missions, projects and daily goals. We should also reduce our expectations and load to the point where you can imagine accomplishing your work with time and energy to spare.

His cited example is Andrew Wiles, a professor and academic who installed specific rules, like no conferences, work from home, and trickling out of completed work to maintain perceived academic cadence, while at the same time he maximized his attention, effort and time towards his mission of solving the mathematical puzzle of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

My pseudo-productivity problem isn’t about busyness nor chat, email or meeting overload. It was largely about having too many projects. In April, 38% of my project time was spent on Playback Pilot (my startup product), 33% on writing and music, plus client work layered underneath. Each area was genuinely productive and important to me. But the total allostatic load has become nearly unsustainable.

A few days ago I sat with the question in my morning journaling, What if I had to only choose just one thing to focus on?. Here was my response:

Pursuing all of these equally is not totally working… If I try to do one thing more than another, time gets squeezed and an area gets neglected. I was really happy with my recent writing campaign and what it unlocked, but it cost me on the music finishing side and app development too…if I had to pick one thing it would be finishing that piece of software [Playback Pilot]

This connects to Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, where he argues that time itself is the existential limiter — “We must make profound and possibility-limiting choices with our time.” Importantly, Newport’s do fewer things isn’t offering resolutions we must follow, but rules that might guide us forward and help us navigate.

Admittedly, doing fewer things can feel hard for me. It’s challenging to say “no” when the core things I’m doing are in the “hell yeah” category. In the past my response might have been to grind and work long hours. But recognizing the longer time horizon needed on certain projects and striving to pursue a more natural pace for entrepreneurship and creativity means enacting several moves here:

Themed days > scattered tasking. Rather than trying to work a little bit each day on all of these areas, I actively prioritize and block out certain mornings or even days. This allows me to be fully focused, find momentum, and make tangible progress.
One meaningful piece advances each week. Tracking my focus hours, while important, is not as important as achieving a concrete output that moves the mission forward.
Trust the cadence. “Gotta just keep going” is the mantra. The pace IS the mindset, the strategy, the process.

The forcing function of recognizing and accepting my one thing for this current season means I’m moving a meaningful piece forward each week and pushing back against asking myself, “Why am I not there yet?” Cut the goal in half and slow output are fine, because I just gotta keep going.

Higher Quality

Obsessing over quality is a cornerstone of Newport’s approach. As he puts it, “Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable.” (p. 135)

As an expert in any field can tell you (and likely something each of us has experienced), learning and improved technical skills can make it hard to look at our previous art or work. Once a perceptual capacity is built, our old work stops sounding the same. Some artists describe this recognition as a form of grief. For example, in building critical listening skills as a musician and audio engineer, I now can no longer unhear certain issues in my songs in progress and the songs I’ve already released.

This is the working artist’s bind that Ira Glass, via Newport, names: “Your taste can guide you toward the best work you’re capable of producing at the moment, but it can also fuel a sense of disappointment in your final result.” (p. 140) Pursuing higher quality has costs — missing short-term opportunities, a slower pace, a form of perfectionism that can look like procrastination. Newport points to Jewel, the musician, who accepted a lower record advance to keep her artistic control intact. Her motto: “Hardwood grows slowly.” (p. 129)

I’m feeling the live version of this right now, finishing my seventh album. Even though a week or so ago I had declared that I was nearing the end with tracked hours at 151.2/160.0 (94%) and had set my pencils-down date at May 17, several changes are forcing me to reevaluate. Both of my core collaborators have contributed fresh recordings (vocals and trumpet). While working with a pro mixer, leveling up my mixing skills and doing reference track analysis, I’ve started to hear what I want the album as a whole to sound like.

The pursuit of higher quality as an artist and music professional means I’m no longer “done” and there is still work to do. The finish line has to be moved. It’s the kind of moment I’ve written about before — finding myself back in the messy middle, where the project isn’t quite where I thought it was.

Finish (at a natural pace)

The book’s central character is John McPhee, an American author whose examples bookend the book. McPhee spent his career at The New Yorker producing meticulous long-form journalism, sometimes spending years on a single piece. Newport opens with him lying on his back, thinking hard about how to make something wonderful, and returns to him at the close with the line:

“Put a drop in the bucket each day. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.” — John McPhee, via Newport (p. 166)

McPhee’s discipline of small daily effort over very long timelines is the practical heart of slow productivity and dovetails with Newport’s middle principle, work at a natural pace. Newport’s point is that “Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable. A more natural, slower, varied pace to work is the foundation of true productivity in the long term.” (p. 94)

I’d argue that natural pace and finishing are the same discipline from different angles. During my 7-week writing sprint, my pace wasn’t frantic or running hot every day. My effort and focus varied over the period, but it still produced steady drops in the bucket. The drops accumulated, and I delivered 9 posts.

As Newport puts it:

“Grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. This path is long. Pace yourself.” (p. 100)

Seasonality Reframe: A closing thought

How do I say “no” to things that are good for me and I care about, but just don’t fit this season?

The core conflict I often face as an artist and goal pursuer is that I feel like I have too many things I want to do and achieve in this life and never enough time to fit it all in. I resonate with Newport’s philosophy and framing, especially his mantra to “Do Fewer Things.” Newport himself and many of the examples he cites work on fewer epic projects and obsess over quality at a slower pace over long periods of time — but with one humanizing nuance: seasonality. Seasonality includes both dedicated pause periods and “temporary periods of maximum intensity.” Slow and intense alternate.

My productivity satisfaction hasn’t been failing because I’m doing the wrong things, but because of existential time limits. I can’t do everything right now — for this season. This season is FOR pushing on Playback Pilot (software to help music producers make progress on music) as my main target, finishing Album 7 on a longer timeline, and accepting writing on a lighter cadence. This is just a moment of self-awareness and personal alignment I have to accept — for now. Eventually I’ll finish one of these things, my priorities will shift, and other goals can slot in.

Each season has its core activities and fruits to be harvested. Parking the goals that don’t fit isn’t quitting them. It’s recognizing that one thing wins for now, and the others wait their turn. Seasons change. Priorities can shift.

Unfortunately, there is no perfect or tidy answer to the question I started with: how do I say no to things I care about but just don’t fit this season? For now, naming the season — and what fits within it — is the best answer I have. Neither Newport nor any other writer on productivity, even one with a philosophical bent, can give you the framework to answer life’s compass questions.

What’s the one thing you’ll pick to prioritize for your current season?

Cut Your Goal in Half: Book Notes on Finish by Jon Acuff — Acuff’s argument is that perfectionism, not laziness, is what kills finishing; cutting the goal in half is the move that lets you actually ship. A practical companion to Newport’s do fewer things at the individual-project scale.
Time Management as Life Philosophy: Book Notes on Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman — Burkeman’s case that you get ~4,000 weeks in a human life, and any meaningful work requires making “profound and possibility-limiting choices” with that finite time. The existential frame underneath Newport’s first principle.
I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Work: Book Notes on Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal — Abdaal flips the usual logic: feeling good isn’t the reward for productive work, it’s the fuel. A useful counter-read to Newport, who is largely silent on the emotional side of sustainable output.
Stuck in the Middle: Why Motivation Collapses Halfway to Your Goal — Behavioral research on the predictable midpoint slump on long goals, and design moves to climb out of the valley. The hidden tax on natural pace once a project runs long.
The Ostrich Problem: Why do we avoid checking our goal progress? — The research-backed habit of avoiding progress information on goals we care about. The personal mirror of pseudo-productivity: visible busyness can quietly mask whether real work is moving.
80 Hours, 9 Posts: What a 7-Week Writing Sprint Taught Me — Debrief from my own 7-week sprint. Live evidence for McPhee’s “drop in the bucket” principle — varied, sustained effort accumulating into real shipped work.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with processing some of the quotes, proofreading and clarity. The four-panel graphic was generated using Google’s Gemini.

80 Hours, 9 Posts: What a 7-Week Writing Sprint Taught Me

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What kind of writer am I? Am I a product builder who writes or a writer who builds products?

I started my personal blog over 18 years ago and have published over 350 posts. But my writing and publishing cadence had become inconsistent over the last couple of years — long gaps between posts, half-finished drafts piling up, and the familiar guilt of knowing I should be writing more but struggling to start and not showing up to write consistently.

So I designed a 7-week sprint to change that. The rules were simple: write consistently across two blogs — markwk.com for personal essays and book reviews, and playbackpilot.com for my music production startup. Track everything. Publish as I go. The core theme tying it together was one I’d been circling for years but had surfaced most acutely in recent months: the psychology and practice of finishing.

I’m currently building an app for music producers, who struggle to finish and stay organized, called Playback Pilot. Our initial survey completed by nearly 500 producers showed that 79% of creators share the same finishing problem and many blamed it on internal factors. In order to explore my own finishing problem across multiple domains and write articles on these interconnected topics, I decided to write it out.

The writing wasn’t easy — most creative work rarely is — but the results were encouraging: in 7 weeks, I logged 80 hours of creation time, published 9 posts across two blogs, and typed 69,000 words. Every target I set was exceeded.

Here’s what I learned, what the data revealed, and discoveries that surprised me.

The Experiment: Campaign-based Goal Tracker for Writing

My long-term intention is to develop a weekly writing cadence (an article per week) and eventually publish a full-length book on goals and tracking progress. Rather than start with that overly ambitious goal, I cut the goal in half and took a short-term experimental approach. I framed it as a campaign or sprint. The benefit of a sprint is that it is specific and explicitly time-bound. A sprint has obvious start points, mid-point check-ins and an end. This gave the goal pursuit a shape and directionality and offered me a chance to reflect at the start, mid-way through and now at the end through this blog post.

From March 12 to April 25, 2026, I set out to write at least 40 hours and publish 9 posts over 7 weeks. I write primarily using plaintext markdown files. I tracked my input (time, typed words) and my output (wordcount, blog), and I used some python code to glue together a simple goal tracker so I can monitor the campaign and see progress week to week during my weekly review. Arguably, the most important component was a simple tracker doc where I logged my intentions, writing principles, what I’d published, what was next, and what I’d cut or deferred. It served as a planning tool, running journal and made my progress visible.

Admittedly, this can feel like a lot of technology pieces to an outsider. But most of these passive tracking tools can be setup in an hour or two, and the immediate and long-term value is a continuous stream of passively tracked data on your writing behavior. You can track your progress day to day and over time. The specific code I wrote for the goal tracker was additive glue that help me automate and monitor. Goals aren’t linear. Nothing replaces the act of checking in on your progress, noting what is working, being honest and open-minded and iterating.

So, how did it go?

The Numbers

Goal	Target	Actual	%
Creation Hours	40h	81.0h	202%
Published Posts	9	9	100%
Words Typed	45,000	69,220	154%

Here is a week-by-week breakdown:

This chart shows the ups and downs of my writing journey. Interestingly, there were strong peaks at the start and end, which are typical of most goals and reminds me of my quick starts when I do a marathon race or the acceleration as I near the finish line. As a working professional, it was impossible to carve out a perfect schedule to write and publish. These ebbs and flows reveal my natural pace and the constraints I faced certain weeks or days.

The timeline above shows the rhythm — the ups and downs of each week. This chart shows the trajectory: despite the messy week-to-week variation, every metric climbed steadily and crossed its target. Hours and words are leading indicators; published posts are the lagging outcome. Consistent, imperfect effort compounds into result.

What I Published

While I largely stayed true to my intention of writing about finishing problem for creatives, my actual output varied as did the time needed to research, write and publish each post:

Post	Blog	Type	Hours	Words
The Ostrich Problem	markwk	Research	9.1h	7,045
Why I’m Building PlaybackPilot	PBP	Founder	3.7h	1,443
Is What I Am Doing Useful?	markwk	Book review	3.1h*	4,500
Unfinished Symphony	PBP	Data-driven	4.3h	3,350
Stuck in the Middle	markwk	Research	10.0h	3,184
Album Management Walkthrough	PBP	Video + blog	4.3h	206
Cut Your Goal in Half	markwk	Book review	2.3h	2,094
Quiet Workarounds	PBP	Research	12.0h	4,055
I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Work	markwk	Book review	4.7h	2,881
		Published total	53.5h	28,758

*Sprint hours only. The Courage to Be Disliked review also had 2.5 hours of prior review work logged in late 2024 and early 2025, bringing the true total to 5.5 hours across 16 months.

Not all of the sprint’s hours went to published posts. I also spent 11.9 hours on drafts that didn’t get finished during the sprint — posts on health and exercise, the data-driven writer’s life, the visibility problem, and the Progress Principle book review. Another 9.4 hours went to journaling and 6.2 hours to planning. In a sprint about finishing, it’s worth noting honestly: some things didn’t get finished. Those drafts aren’t dead — they’re parked, and several are near the top of Sprint 2’s queue.

What Worked and What I learned

The benefit of a short goal pursuit cycle is that it offers a chance to try some things and see what works and what doesn’t. Overall, I’d say structuring this as just a few week sprint took a lot of the pressure off. By picking a few specific posts that were my must-win’s meant those got prioritized but didn’t have to happen all at once. Also, by leaving gaps and managing based on energy level and what pulled by interest, several unexpected blog posts emerged organically.

1. The ultradian sweet spot

There is a tempo or pace to our daily productivity and cognitive focus. While circadian rhythms describe the well-known phenomenon of our sleep and wake patterns, it was interesting to see in my own data the lesser known pattern called ultradian rhythms. As discovered by the same scientist who co-discovered REM sleep, humans possess a roughly 90 minute window during the daytime of peak executive function, before cognitive resources deplete and we lose focus. Driven by a host of biological mechanisms, ultradian rhythms describe these shorter rest-activity cycles.

When I looked at my data, my individual writing sessions clustered around 1.1 hours — comfortably inside the 60–90 minute ultradian focus window. My body had been self-organizing into hour-long focus blocks without me consciously designing for it. But the real finding was at the day level: peak writing efficiency came on days where I wrote 1-2 hours total (1,254 words/hour). By 4+ hours of total daily writing, my words-per-hour had dropped to 605 — less than half the peak rate.

We often metaphorically describe our focus like an energy reservoir that decreases as we put in more and more work over time. The practical reality is that our creative energy is more like a wave, not a reservoir. Biologically, we can sustain focus for roughly 60-90 minutes. During peak immersion, our brain state changes and we can enter flow, a state of cognitive peak performance.

After this period of peak focus, we enter what is called the ultradian trough. This is the natural and automatic downswing of the ultradian wave. Our nervous system switches from sympathetic (alert, focused, high-Beta) to parasympathetic (recovery, rest, Alpha/Theta). We feel a bit groggy, our attention wanders and we struggle to concentrate. Culturally, we sometimes feel guilty for our inability to focus, and we are tempted to try and power through. Most folks, like me, often crave caffeine, a snack or an urge to switch tasks, check their email or phone.

The practical reality is that you aren’t lazy. Post-focus trough is normal. You are merely a surfer coming down on a natural peak focus period, after the wave crested. Your body and mind are telling you to pause and take a break for recovery and creative incubation. We often don’t heed this signal or call to pause. If you don’t take a break, you incur a recovery penalty, inhibiting your focus and creativity later in the day and increasing your daytime chronic stress. By contrast, a 20-30 min break clears mental fatigue, resets your prefrontal cortex, and enables you to ride the next wave and peak.

For me personally, the biggest shift going forward is giving myself permission to take creative recovery breaks and recognizing when I’ve hit the point of diminishing returns for the day. My sessions are already well-timed — about one ultradian cycle each. What I need to stop doing is chaining too many of them together, filling every available hour with writing and expecting the fourth hour to be as productive as the first. Instead of asking “how many hours can I write today?” I should start asking, “How do I make the most of my one or two peak sessions?” This question led me to my next lesson.

2. Protect the morning block

Intuitively, I’ve long identified that my most productive block of time each weekday falls between about 9:30 and noon. My best mornings follow a natural rhythm: coffee and news by 8:30, some journaling or research notes as a warmup start at 9, then focused writing by 10, and somewhere in that first concentrated hour, I reach focus and flow. This is where I can and should tackle my biggest cognitive challenges of the day, and when do, I get into deep work and flow and produce my best work. Unfortunately, I haven’t protected or honored this block. Even though I can largely do my client and product work later in the day with similar efficiency and output, I don’t. I’ve allowed my mornings to get sucked into “other people’s problems” over the years. My writing output over the last 3-4 years is probably most tied to the loss of consistent morning writing blocks.

For this writing sprint, the main structural change I put in place was scheduling two or three dedicated mornings each week exclusively for writing. No meetings, no quick check-in’s on a client project, no morning review of my growth marketing, and no email. I blocked out 9:30-noon on Tuesdays and Wednesdays as non-negotiable writing sessions in my weekly plan. This was my primary creative constraint. I’d argue that this single move mattered more than any other writing technique I could have tried.

Even though I didn’t know the technical term for it then, this focused morning block aligns well with science of ultradian rhythms and my data showed it too.

My morning sessions averaged 1.2 hours at 874 words/hour across 35 sessions. Afternoon sessions were shorter (1.0 hours average) and slightly less productive (794 words/hour across 31 sessions). Mornings accounted for half my total hours but a disproportionate share of my best output. When I deferred writing to the afternoon, I still wrote, but the difference in depth and quality was visible.

It also seems that starting my day with writing resulted in a habit shift. All parts of my day tended to be centered on writing to think and thinking through writing. In short, writing became not just a scheduled event but a pervasive and habitual cognitive activity.

Protecting the morning block isn’t about discipline; it’s about alignment. You’re scheduling your hardest creative work during the core windows where your biology is designed to support it.

3. One post, one day

I have a tendency to let my curiosity get the best of me and end up getting pulled down rabbit holes into topics that seem related to what I’m writing or researching but in actuality are forms of procrastination. This can result in a multiple day forays into new areas rather than finishing an article. My drafts folder is a graveyard of many, many half-finished posts, some of them hundreds or even thousands of words long.

The fix was simple: pick one post and work only on that post for the day.

The clearest evidence for the efficacy of this practice came at the end of the sprint. On Monday, I drafted and published the Quiet Workarounds post in 4.8 hours in one day. On Tuesday, on a low energy day, I did the same with the Feel-Good Productivity review, which start to finish took me 4.7 hours. It worked because I wasn’t half-engaged on several ideas. Each day had exactly one focus and each one got a single post completed.

If you are looking for a guiding framework, I’d suggest following what I recommended for music producers and called Active-List Rule: name the one active thing, park everything else.

Split attention kills momentum. Focused attention means your best energy is directed at your most significant target and what’s closest to done. The key takeaway: committing to a single post per writing day. The two-posts-in-two-days was my proof.

4. Two blogs created natural variety

The main output I wanted to move and unlock was publishing blog posts, articles and a youtube video for my music finishing app, PlaybackPilot.com. I’ve spent months marketing and building it, but I was struggling to tell the story. I hadn’t put enough words down for my audience and for my early users. Frankly, after months of research and building, I had a lot of big and small ideas to process and share about what it takes to help music producers finish more music.

Early on, I elected to write a few posts for markwk.com too. Even though this breaks from the previously stated focus rule of one topic or goal at a time, I knew that I had to harness my creativity and curiosity and leave myself more than one outlet and format to express my thinking. There was also a lot of natural overlaps too. This gave me a space to write more organically on the finishing psychology and how it fits and applies outside of music.

Here is what happened: 5 posts on markwk.com (personal essays + book reviews) and 4 on playbackpilot.com (product research + founder story). I could switch to different types and formats depending on my energy level. On a low energy day or when I needed a quick win, I could write a book review post. On a high energy day, I could work on a research-based post. By having a space for both, I could avoid monotony and could cross pollinate key concepts between the two blogs.

5. Book reviews are the fastest format

Writing is a time consuming and creatively messy affair. One of the data surprises I stumbled into was how dramatically the format or type of post affected the writing time and time-to-publish.

On average, book reviews took ~3.4 hours (~3.2k words). Deep research posts — the Ostrich Problem, Stuck in the Middle, and Quiet Workarounds — averaged ~10.4 hours (~4.8k words). The data-driven survey post (Unfinished Symphony) clocked closer to 4.3 hours, behaving more like a shorter analysis piece. The founder story took 3.7 hours (1,443 words), and the album walkthrough was primarily a video — 4.3 hours of production for 206 words of accompanying text.

Generally speaking, I am not a writer of the mundane. In-depth, data-driven and research-backed posts are where I feel most pulled as an author and thinker. While I can still write decent material in shorter formats (like newsletters and emails), I thrive and grow the most developing and drafting these research posts. I like doing research and synthesizing learnings into my own philosophical essays and science-backed insights. I just need to recognize that these articles and chapters take days or even weeks to produce.

I also need to recognize my available time and energy limits and leave space for shorter forms of writing. For me, book review posts allow me to process key ideas from the books I read — and the data revealed how much prior engagement shapes the speed.

The two fastest book reviews drew on prior thinking, but in different forms. Courage to Be Disliked actually had 2.5 hours of earlier review work logged in late 2024 and early 2025 — the sprint just added the final 3 hours of editing and publishing. Cut Your Goal in Half had clippings from my reading and a single thesis simple enough to draft in one morning (2.3 hours, start to finish). Feel-Good Productivity, despite a stub note from a year earlier, required processing the book’s ideas largely from scratch during the sprint — and took nearly twice as long (4.7 hours) as a result.

The efficiency unlock isn’t the format alone — it’s the depth of prior engagement the review draws on. Notes you’ve wrestled with, clippings you’ve actually highlighted, an earlier essay attempt you can mine from. Reading without engagement leaves you starting from scratch when it’s time to write. Some books are also inherently faster to review than others — a book with one clear thesis (like Acuff’s “cut the goal in half”) writes up faster than one with a dozen interlocking frameworks.

Book reviews offer a palette cleanser, and in the context of a writing sprint, they gave me quick wins, improved my momentum, and blog post numbers in less time than longer research posts.

6. Smart notes are fuel, especially for low-energy days

Whether it’s writing, music or some other creative project, sometimes we just don’t feel like doing our craft or core artistic activity. Sometimes I didn’t feel like writing for one reason or another during this sprint. I might have been feeling low energy, creative uncertainty or something else. Recognizing this feeling and labeling was important, because it meant I could get over my guilt and procrastination and avoid abandoning my craft for the session and instead I could ask myself the question: If instead of drafting a post, what is something else I could do before or instead of writing?

This allowed me to shrink down my expectations for the session and give myself a few options for next moves. I could journal about my feelings, ideas cluttering my mind or just stream of consciousness. On days when I didn’t know what to write, struggled with the throughline, or my energy was low, the shrink move was simple: draft a smart note instead. Review some highlights from a book I’d read. Process a concept I’d been circling. Connect two ideas that hadn’t been linked yet. A smart note was still progress.

Over the course of 7 weeks, I journaled across 12 dedicated sessions and wrote in my notes app on 37 of 49 days, accumulating roughly 51,000 words — most of which never became blog posts but regularly became the seeds for them. I created 29 new smart notes on topics like constraints, away moves, self-forgiveness, producer workarounds, and the psychology of finishing. I’ve written before about the power of systematic notes, an idea borrowed from Sönke Ahrens that describes smart notes as a preparatory thinking practice that can be reused in whatever you create or write. It’s a practice that was somewhat dormant for me but reemerged organically and proved useful again.

Not every dedicated writing session during the sprint produced publishable prose. Some of my best sessions were spent journaling, reviewing book highlights, or drafting smart notes on concepts I was circling. At the time, these felt like detours and pseudoproductivity. In retrospect, I realize that these were building blocks and stepping stones.

My best writing blog posts and sessions pulled from existing material — journal entries, book clippings, archived notes, previously published posts — rather than starting from a blank page. I have years of notes and hundreds of book highlights. The sprint taught me to treat that archive as raw material and smart notes as fuel to assemble from. For example, when I sat down to draft the Quiet Workarounds post, the hardest conceptual work was already done in the notes. I was assembling, not inventing. It meant a lot of what I wrote about and published came from a related principle: adapt, don’t rewrite.

What I’d Do Differently

Here are a few things I’d change:

Just type — Some days I spent a lot of time spinning thoughts. This can be a necessary step towards figuring out what I want to write, the throughline or key novel points, but many times it’s glorified procrastination. Depending on the state of the draft and assuming I have an outline, the best recipe is often just writing stuff down — good, bad or otherwise. Once I got a crappy first draft, a lot of the subsequent writing followed on and came out of that. Most writing is rewriting, as they say.
Budget 2x the time — We are terrible at predicting how long knowledge work takes. Unlike a step-by-step process for producing material objects, creative and intellectual work is extremely difficult to pinpoint in advance. I realized this early on and tried multiple ways to cut down what I was trying to achieve. But I still underestimated. If I can’t cut the scope, then I need to budget more time — and not feel guilty about it.
Score the sessions, not just the output — For Sprint 2, I’d like to track not just hours and word counts but session quality: what I intended, what I actually did, what stage the draft was in, and whether the session felt productive. Understanding which sessions produce flow and which don’t would help me design better ones.

And perhaps the most important lesson of all: forgive yourself for the sessions that don’t go as planned. Not every day is a peak day. Some sessions produce a smart note instead of a blog post, some produce a rough paragraph instead of a finished section, and some don’t produce much at all. That’s not failure — that’s the rhythm. The sprint taught me that self-compassion isn’t the opposite of productivity; it’s what makes sustained productivity possible. If you guilt yourself about yesterday, it’s hard to show up today.

What’s Next

This sprint has rebuilt my writing habit and given me renewed confidence as a writer again. I haven’t fully tamed my wildly exaggerated expectations. But at least I have evidence for more realistic goal setting and a writing practice to continue to grow.

For my next sprint, I adjusted my targets (50h, 6 posts, 2-3 videos). The new theme is focused on data for finishing. This post is the first act. My new question: Can I add video creation into my creative cadence? And the lingering question: Does my writing habit last?

If you’re thinking about your own writing sprint: pick a duration (6-8 weeks), set modest targets, track your hours, protect your mornings, start with the easiest post, and take notes, reflect and iterate.

Concluding Thoughts

When I started this sprint, I wasn’t sure whether I was a product builder who writes or a writer who builds products. After 80 hours of creation time and 9 published articles — writing on 40 of 49 days — the answer is clearer: I’m both — and neither label matters as much as showing up, putting in the work, and pushing to the finish line.

Through the act of writing itself — and through learning about the psychology of finishing — I discovered a deeper lesson. Finishing anything comes down to a simple loop: notice where you’re stuck, shrink your next move until it’s hard not to start, and forgive yourself when progress looks different than you expected. Track it. Reflect on it. Iterate. Keep going. That’s the whole practice.

The Ostrich Problem — why we avoid checking progress on goals we care about
Cut Your Goal in Half — perfectionism as the enemy of finishing
I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Work — feeling good as productivity fuel
Stuck in the Middle — midpoint motivation collapse
30 Days, 30 Songs — an earlier creative sprint in music

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author based on personal tracking data. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with data work (analysis, organization and charting), structural editing, and clarity.

I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Work: Book Notes on Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll admit that I sometimes feel guilty when I struggle to be productive. A few days ago, after a rough night of sleep and a productive-but-not-particularly-demanding morning, I struggled to get back to work after lunch. I knew what I wanted to accomplish. But something was off. I elected to take a break, but even after the break I still wasn’t feeling it. What was going on? Just the day before I’d put in nearly 6 hours of focused writing and published one of my strongest pieces in weeks. What was wrong? Why was I struggling to gut it out and push through?

As a tech entrepreneur and software engineer, it can often feel like the path to productive output is constantly grinding. “Do More Faster” was one of the mantras while I worked at Techstars in China, and it seems like the path to greatness, success, and investment requires a life of nearly constant effort and perpetual forward motion. But what do you do when you feel off, burned out, lonely, and frankly not motivated to continue?

On this particular day, instead of continuing to struggle through and feel bad, I realized I needed a break. Maybe I should take the rest of the day off entirely. I had been sprinting on several fronts for weeks. I’d made incredible progress on a host of challenges, and on top of client work, I was also spending most of my weekends working on my next album. My batteries were drained.

It was in that moment that I picked up Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal, which I had read a few years ago. As I started re-reading my notes and highlights, I realized I needed to forgive myself. My body and mind were signaling something, and instead of ignoring the signal, I should change course for the day.

What if our productivity and output wasn’t about simply grinding and pushing but truly a function of feeling good and having fun? What if feeling good was the fuel for deep, meaningful work?

Abdaal’s argument is simple and counterintuitive: feeling good isn’t the reward for productive work; it is in fact the prerequisite.

My Quick Take Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I rated this book a 5 out of 5.
Would I recommend it? Yes, I’d definitely recommend this book since it offers a lot of “bang for your buck” in terms of key science and thinkers on productivity and well-being in one place. It’s an important counterthesis to willpower and grind as the primary path to reaching your goals. I appreciated that it offered various reflection journeys (like the odyssey plan) for thinking about high-level purpose questions and tactical tools (alignment experiment) for implementing in small changes.
Would I read it again? No, while this book offers a lot of great material, it felt like a book I would read once.

What I Got Out of This Book

“Success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success.”

At the start of the book, Abdaal shares his personal story that after multiple years grinding towards becoming a medical doctor, he realized that “Working harder wasn’t going to bring me happiness” (p. 4). We often believe that happiness is the result of hard work and comes after reaching success, but what if we’ve had things reversed? What if feel-good emotions are actually the fuel towards becoming successful?

The central thesis of Feel-Good Productivity can be summarized with the quote, “Success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success.” (p. 10). Abdaal’s reversal thesis is grounded in positive psychology and in particular Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s research on emotions and how we think and act.

Evolutionarily, emotions shape how we act and focus. Negative emotions (fear, anxiety, stress) narrow our attention and trigger tunnel vision. This is useful and necessary when we need to escape danger: cortisol spikes, focus tightens, enabling us to act fast. But this narrowing comes at a cost. When the threat isn’t a life-or-death predator but a deadline, a half-finished track, or our inbox, the same stress backfires. These negative emotions shrink our thinking when we need it to expand.

Fredrickson’s insight, which Abdaal develops, is that positive emotions do the opposite. According to the Broaden-and-Build Theory, when we experience feel-good emotions and situations, like joy, curiosity, interest, play, our awareness broadens. As Abdaal puts it, “When we’re feeling good, our minds open up, we take in more information, and we see more possibilities around us.” (p. 6). Over time, these broadening moments build up key resources: resilience, creativity, problem-solving skills, social connections, and even improved mental and physical health. And when the positive emotions fade, your resources remain, giving you a key capacity to leverage both now and in the future.

Researcher Teresa Amabile found a similar loop in organizational settings — what she calls the Progress Principle: small wins fuel positive inner work life, which fuels better performance, which produces more small wins. Different research tradition, same virtuous cycle.

I often make music or work on my startup in the evenings, which can be tricky after a day of work when I might feel stressed, tired, annoyed or anxious. Rather than immediately try and force myself to work when I’m not feeling good, I’ll do something active and outdoors, like go for a run, play pickleball, or take a walk. If I’m particularly tired out, I take a rest by watching some YouTube videos or just read a book for fun. By taking a break and doing something fun, energizing and joy-inducing, I’m able to decrease my stress and replace these negative emotions. Once I’m in a better mood, I am able to broaden my thinking, engage with a fresh batch of creative challenges, get into deep work mode.

Fredrickson calls this the Undoing Hypothesis: positive emotions actively undo the physiological and cardiovascular effects of negative emotions.

So if positive emotions are the fuel, what happens when that fuel runs out and we experience burnout from weeks or months of working on something that doesn’t feel right?

“Burnout can happen to anyone when work stops feeling meaningful”

“Burnout isn’t just a thing that happens to overworked people in stressful jobs. It can happen to anyone when work stops feeling meaningful, enjoyable or manageable.” (p. 134)

We commonly think about burnout as simply overwork, typically stemming from doing too much or trying to do too much without time off. The WHO defines burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” characterised by “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy” (2019).

While technically accurate, Abdaal argues this is an oversimplification and deprives us of recognizing the causes and knowing possible fixes. For him, there are three types of burnout with differing causes and fixes:

Overexertion: Doing too much, too fast. Classic form of burnout.
- Cause? You are working all the time and sprinting constantly without an end or boundaries. You are constantly saying yes, instead of no to dozens of things you don’t have time or resources to do now.
- Fix? Take a break and get some rest. Say “No.” Better energy management.
- Tactical Antidote? The Energy Investment Portfolio [See Below]
Depletion: Insufficient deep recovery.
- Cause? This isn’t just doing too much but instead not giving yourself proper room to sleep, relax and recharge. You might be getting breaks but they are shallow and you aren’t really recovering.
- Fix? Real time off, Reitoff Principle (permission to write off a day without guilt).
Misalignment: Feeling like you are doing the wrong stuff.
- Cause? This is the most subtle and counterintuitive form of burnout because you can be productive AND burned out if the work doesn’t align with your values. It can also stem from the social environment and work with the wrong kinds or styles of people and support.
- Fix? Unlike the first two types, misalignment burnout requires a deeper look at yourself and what you’re doing. It calls for personal reflection on what you care about and aligning your life and work accordingly.
- Tactical Antidote? Alignment Experiments [See Below]
Let’s look at two antidotes for two of these forms of burnout.

Energy Investment Portfolio: Fix for Overexertion

How much can you actually do at one time? Is your energy portfolio overloaded and preventing you from focusing and meaningfully moving forward on what matters?

Abdaal’s tactical antidote to the classic form of burnout — overexertion — is having Energy Investment Portfolio and limiting how many active projects you are doing. He recommends having two lists. List A holds your dreams and is basically everything you’d like to do eventually. List B holds your active investments and he suggests having just 3-5 projects that you’re investing energy into in a given week.

How to decide where to put your energy? Abdaal recommends using Derek Sivers’ pithy “Hell yeah, or no” as your filter to decide what goes in or out. If it’s not a hell yeah, it stays on List A. If it’s a hell yeah, then it’s in.

As a music producer, I use a similar move that I call the “parking lot” and wrote about in my Quiet Workarounds post. The problem is that, like most music makers, I have lots of unfinished tracks and it can be hard to focus and make progress on my pile of unsorted demos. In order to deal with this, I dump tracks that aren’t being actively worked on into my parking lot. The tracks or album project isn’t abandoned or dead; they’re just parked for later and can be moved to active when I finish something or have an open slot.

By determining what your priorities are and trimming back your active projects list to 3-5 areas, you’ll feel more relaxed, less stressed by the pile, and more able to act — whether you’re dealing with overexertion, stuck in the middle, or something else entirely. Shrink down what you are focused on and you can often intuitively know what your next move is.

But what if the problem isn’t overexertion? What if you’re putting in the right amount of time and energy on things but it’s actually the wrong stuff for you?

Alignment Experiments: How to navigate when you feel misaligned

What do you do when your form of burnout doesn’t stem from overexertion or lack of recovery but because you are no longer aligned with what you are doing?

It’s easy and obvious to advocate for leading a work and creative life centered on fun and play, but it’s much harder to offer a simple principle or solution when you feel off, uncertain and misaligned. It’s here where I’d argue Abdaal offers his most original and impactful contribution. His response centers on the pursuit of authenticity and navigating the modern challenge of value and purpose alignment.

The research backs how important alignment is to our sense of well-being. Psychologist Anna Sutton trawled through 51 studies with over 36,000 participants and found that when people make decisions aligned with their personal values, they aren’t just happier — they’re more engaged with the tasks before them. (p. 186) Having a job, hobby or life situation aligned with your purpose or identity can feel like a luxury or nice-to-have, but the research would say otherwise. Value alignment and living with authenticity is actually a performance enhancer.

Abdaal offers a two-horizon approach to finding alignment:

The longer horizon: Abdaal suggests several reflection exercises for exploring bigger purpose questions: the eulogy method (“What would I feel good about someone saying in my eulogy?”), the odyssey plan (write out three 5-year paths: your current trajectory, a completely different path, and a radical path where money and social expectations don’t matter), and the 12-month celebration (imagine telling your best friend about your progress a year from now).
The shorter horizon: Alignment experiments are essentially small tweaks and iterative changes you undertake to get to the life you want to lead. Abdaal suggests identifying one area of your life where things feel unfulfilling and then change just one independent variable. After, journal about its effects and your learnings, explore alternatives and keep tweaking without committing long-term until it works for you.

Abdaal wonderfully captures the essence of this in the following two questions:

“If you were to change one — just one — independent variable in your life, what would it be? And what effect do you think it would have on your situation?” (p. 191)

As a data-driven self-improver and self-experimenting biohacker, I resonate a lot with Abdaal’s overall thinking and approach here. Over the last year I’ve shifted from working on client work towards my own value-aligned startup and product, Playback Pilot. In my on-going “track everything” experimental blog series, I’ve tried dozens of quantified self and self-tracking methods and small interventions to see what works to improve my productive creative life, my health and longevity. I recently started an experiment to see the impact structured endurance training has on my health (sleep, VO2 Max, biomarkers) using a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) and a wearable. Even this blog post is part of an alignment experiment: “what happens if I write consistently for 7 weeks?”

“The best antidote to doing nothing is simply to do something. You can take action by first defining your next step and then tracking your progress.” (p. 133)

The key idea is that you don’t need to change everything to learn and grow into the person you want to be; just change one thing, pay attention, reflect and let what you discover guide and lead you to your next move. One step at a time with intention and self-awareness.

Concluding Thought: “I forgive myself, now I can study”

One of the most powerful and simplest techniques Abdaal suggests is simply forgiving yourself and moving on. He cites a procrastination study by psychologist Michael Wohl: students who practiced self-forgiveness after procrastinating on an exam not only reported fewer negative emotions but were measurably more productive on the next one. Self-forgiveness allowed them to “move past their maladaptive behaviour and focus on the upcoming examination without the burden of past acts.” (p. 131) The title of Wohl’s paper says it all: “I forgive myself, now I can study.”

That’s what finally clicked on that rough afternoon after lunch. The move wasn’t to push through. It was to stop punishing myself for not wanting to. I set aside my primary task and my client work, pulled up my notes and highlights on this book, and just followed the thread. One simple session with just a step or two to get started. I spun out a few smart notes into my backlog, jotted down fresh thoughts on Abdaal’s ideas, and summarized a handful of his quotes in my own words. Without meaning to, I ended up with the rough start of the draft that became this post. No sprint, no deadline, no guilt over the stalled rest of my day. Just a few steps forward without trying to finish the whole thing. I had forgiven myself, and now I was able to work.

Which is exactly Abdaal’s bigger point: feeling good isn’t the reward for productive work, it’s the fuel. It sounds like a platitude until you’ve spent an afternoon proving the opposite case to yourself. If the whole book compresses into nine words, it’s this one question:

“What would this look like if it were fun?” (p. 24)

Finish by Jon Acuff — my review — perfectionism as the enemy of finishing; cut the goal in half
The Courage to Be Disliked by Kishimi & Koga — my review — Adlerian psychology on self-acceptance and contribution
The Progress Principle by Amabile & Kramer — [review in progress] — small wins as the most powerful motivator; same causal loop as broaden-and-build
The Ostrich Problem — my post — why we avoid checking progress
Stuck in the Middle — my post — midpoint motivation collapse

References

Abdaal, A. (2023). Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You. Celadon Books.
Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist 56(3): 218-226.
Fredrickson, B. L., et al. (2000). The undoing effect of positive emotions. Motivation and Emotion 24(4): 237-258.
Wohl, M. J. A., Pychyl, T. A., & Bennett, S. H. (2010). I forgive myself, now I can study: How self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(7), 803-808. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.029
Sutton, A. (2020). Living the good life: A meta-analysis of authenticity, well-being, and engagement. Personality and Individual Differences, 153, 109645.
Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119.
Amabile, T., & Kramer, S. (2011). The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Harvard Business Press.

Cut Your Goal in Half: Book Notes on Finish by Jon Acuff

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I often treat my blog writing and even simple book review posts like they need to be 2000+ word opuses involving research, sophisticated arguments and deep philosophical engagement. The end result is that I have read hundreds of books and amassed 35,000+ Kindle highlights, but only 7 book reviews have graduated to published posts on my blog. That’s a humbling conversion rate of roughly 2%.

What if I cut in half my goal and expectation on what a book review should entail? How might this impact my ability to actually finish?

I recently read Jon Acuff’s Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done, and the irony is not lost on me. This is a book about finishing things, reviewed by someone who chronically doesn’t finish book reviews. Acuff’s core argument is that perfectionism is the principal enemy of finishing. My 2% graduation rate is a call out that something isn’t quite working.

I could argue that the book reviews I do finish and publish are of the highest quality and tend to be books that move me or matter in deeply personal and important ways. All the same, not all books merit that degree of engagement. Many make one or two strong points and likely only deserve a 300-500 word take, not a 2,000 word treatise. My perfectionism on format has been its own noble obstacle.

So this review is my attempt to practice what Acuff preaches: cut the goal in half, write the thing, and be okay with letting go.

My Quick Take Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐½ I rated this book a 4.5 out of 5.
Would I recommend it? Yes, I’d recommend this to anyone who starts more things than they finish (which is basically everyone I know, including me). Especially useful for creators, writers and entrepreneurs who struggle with the messy middle.
Would I read it again? Probably not. The principles are simple enough to incorporate and remember. The hard part is remembering to apply them.
What was missing? I felt like the author should have recognized the researcher who helped process his survey responses and incorporated more studies and science on behavior change.

What I Got Out of This Book

“Perfectionism magnifies your mistakes and minimizes your progress.”

Acuff correctly points out that perfectionism is disguised as high standards but operates as a saboteur and blocker to action. He breaks out several forms of perfectionism:

Your goal should be bigger
I can’t until…
You can do it all

The result is that we set goals that are too large, feel embarrassed when we fall short and end up abandoning rather than reframing and adjusting.

His own research backs it up by claiming that participants who cut their goal in half increased their performance on similar challenges by 63% and that 90% reported higher motivation because the goal felt attainable. Personally, I wish he spent more time explaining the background of this research and at least contextualizing it and sharing overall numbers. Regardless, the options, as he puts it, are stark: “Quit the goal because it was too big, or cut it in half and finish.” (p. 25)

I’ve struggled with these demons of perfectionism on several occasions. When I was working on my own goals and self-tracking book, I failed to realize and celebrate the milestones I was hitting, because the book as a whole wasn’t done and the end result was incomplete and awkward. Instead of celebrating the stage and then taking a small pause and adjusting towards writing for the next phase, I gave up.

In some ways, I could argue that tackling a book writing project as a few months effort was a terribly wrong-sized goal. It was a noble achievement that I delivered something, even though it was an incomplete overall mess of a first draft. The better approach would have been to frame and think of it as a book treatment project whose target aim was finishing a book pitch, an intro, one complete chapter and a general outline. Focusing on this step with the timeline I had would have given me something to realistically reach as the deadline loomed. Sometimes you have to aim at finishing something as a stepping stone towards finishing that eventual everything.

“A noble obstacle is a virtuous-sounding reason for not working toward a finish.”

Are you struggling to move forward because of an excuse or a fear?

Acuff distinguishes between what he calls a hiding place — “an activity you focus on instead of your goal” — and a noble obstacle — “a virtuous-sounding reason for not working toward a finish” (p. 75). Both serve the same function: they let you feel productive while avoiding the thing that actually matters.

These are concepts that struck home for me. My classic blocker is that I’ll often assign a precursor to actually doing the core creative activity or task. The “I should do X before I do Y” means I insert conditions to starting or finishing something.

I’ll talk about wishing I had a certain skill in order to actually finish my project or goal. These are all what I’d term an “endearing excuse” or “relatable emotion.” It’s endearing because it seems like it’s true and necessary but it’s a hiding place kind of procrastination. It’s relatable because they sound like solid excuses that artists or working professionals can relate to, nod their heads and allow myself to not do the thing. In any case, they are reasons we tell others or ourselves that hinder us from forward movement and positive momentum. And once the noble obstacle is in place, we often stop checking whether we’re making progress at all — what psychologists call the ostrich problem. The hiding place keeps us from doing the work; the ostrich problem keeps us from seeing that we aren’t.

The “I can’t until…” pattern is a classic noble obstacle: I can’t launch until the business model is perfect. I can’t publish until I’ve done more research. I can’t start until I learn X. We construct hurdles on our own path until the lane is so clogged we couldn’t possibly move or run today.

I’ve seen this pattern play out empirically. When I surveyed 400+ music producers for my app Playback Pilot, one of the top four bottlenecks was sound selection (auditioning presets, scrolling through sample packs, hunting for the perfect drum hit). It accounted for nearly 11% of all responses. It feels productive. It looks like creative work. But it’s a producer’s version of Acuff’s noble obstacle: a virtuous-sounding activity that keeps you from actually arranging, mixing and finishing.

In my own survey, the broader finding was even more striking: 73% of producers attributed their finishing struggles to internal factors — perfectionism, overthinking, self-doubt — not external ones like time or tools. The enemy of finishing, as Acuff might put it, is in our heads, not just out in the world.

Concluding Thought: “Goals you refuse to chase don’t disappear — they become ghosts that haunt you.”

Acuff’s Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done is an easy read with clear language and some striking, relatable examples. He offers great labels for our challenges with goal pursuit. But at times I think he misses the core emotional background that hinders us from finishing. He hints at this through a passage from Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

In Steinbeck’s novel, Henri the shipbuilder spends years building a boat but tears it apart before completion each and every time. A friend understands: “Henri loves boats but he’s afraid of the ocean… So you see, he never finishes the boat — so he doesn’t ever have to launch it.” (p. 172)

Goal pursuits are complex, multiheaded monsters. They can fire us up with excitement and pull at us in a highly engaging and motivating way, but not all goals matter to us in the same way. Some are actually goals we think we should have but don’t actually care for. Even goals we do align with and care about will face obstacles — the lull and swirl we experience when we get stuck in the middle phase.

I don’t think Acuff fully articulates the emotional landscape of goal pursuit, though he does find some early moorings for how complicated humans think and treat their goals. He briefly talks about why we sometimes secretly choose to stay unfinished, because it gives us control over the outcome. For example, we don’t want to finish and still fail or not get the emotional satisfaction we have been imagining (“if I never try, I at least know the outcome”).

Acuff’s counter is simple and hard to argue with: “You’ll never know the unbelievable joy of keeping a promise to yourself unless you finish.” (p. 185)

The producers I surveyed want to finish 7.9 tracks per month; they actually finish 3.7. Those unfinished 4.2 tracks per month are Acuff’s ghosts, accumulating in hard drives and project folders and weighing on us as creators. The data confirmed what I already sensed from my own music making: finishing isn’t a side problem. It’s the problem. And the ghosts don’t go away just because you start something new — they pile up.

Even though I started this review and post with the mantra and principle of cutting the goal in half and finishing faster, it still took me nearly two hours. I’ll take heart that it’s at least one unfinished book review I have finished.

But what about the dozens of other “ghost ships” haunting the harbor of my writing drafts and music catalog? So many ideas I cared enough to start but for one reason or another I haven’t finished piling up from months and even years ago. Reading Acuff, I had to ask myself his hardest question: “What am I getting out of not finishing?” (p. 182). Is it an excuse — I can’t do it until…? A wish for control that the reception will be all positive? Or simply trying to do too much all at once and not moving forward at all? Likely some combination. But unless I start aiming at smaller objectives and actually finishing them, I’ll never find out — because I’ll never finish.

Slow Productivity by Cal Newport — currently reading
The ONE Thing by Gary Keller — previously read
Two Awesome Hours by Josh Davis — on the list
Stuck in the Middle — my own published post on the psychology of midpoint motivation collapse, which pairs well with Acuff’s framework

Additional Book Notes, Quotes and Key Takeaways

On perfectionism as the enemy:

“The day after perfect is what separates finishers from starters.” (p. 12)
“Perfectionism magnifies your mistakes and minimizes your progress.” (p. 14)
“Perfectionism believes that the harder something is, the more miserable something is, the better it is.” (p. 47)

On right-sizing your goals:

“Those who cut their goal in half increased their performance on past similar challenges by over 63 percent.” (p. 23)
“The only way to accomplish a new goal is to feed it your most valuable resource: time. And what we never like to admit is that you don’t just give time to something, you take it from something else.” (p. 33)
“If you’re unhappy with your progress, you have three different dials you can adjust. The goal. The timeline. The actions.” (p. 163)

On avoidance and noble obstacles:

“A hiding place is an activity you focus on instead of your goal. A noble obstacle is a virtuous-sounding reason for not working toward a finish.” (p. 75)
“‘What’s next’ will always look more interesting than ‘what’s now.’” (p. 82)
“If we don’t examine ourselves mindfully and gently, we may think that our failures to meet our goals are due to our laziness or bad strategy, when in reality they are caused by the secret rules that make our finishes impossible.” (p. 120)

On the fear of finishing — and the joy on the other side:

“The day before done is terrifying.” (p. 170)
“What am I getting out of not finishing?” (p. 182)
“Goals you refuse to chase don’t disappear — they become ghosts that haunt you.” (p. 189)
“You’ll never know the unbelievable joy of keeping a promise to yourself unless you finish.” (p. 185)

Stuck in the Middle: Why Motivation Collapses Halfway to Your Goal

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Even though I had finished dozens of songs and released 6 albums, I dreaded working on my latest music album. I didn’t even want to open Ableton, my music production software. I couldn’t get myself to do even the simplest acts to make progress — reviewing, diagnosing, or basic reworking of tracks. I was stuck.

I was 25 hours and ten weeks into my next album, averaging barely 90 minutes a week, with multiple weeks of nothing. The beginning had been exciting. I’d spent a fun first month jamming and creating new demos — 30+ tracks already. But somewhere around August, I stalled. My weekly music hours dropped to almost nothing. My album tracking spreadsheet hadn’t changed in months. Months had passed with little or no progress, and I found myself pulled into other interests. I stopped checking my spreadsheet, stopped reviewing my session logs, stopped looking at the data entirely. I’d later learn this is what psychologists call the ostrich problem — avoiding progress information on goals we care about.

Have you ever gotten stuck halfway through a goal you cared about?

If you’ve ever pursued a goal with real passion and energy and then hit a wall — not at the beginning, not at the end, but somewhere in the murky middle — you know the feeling. The thrill of starting is gone. The finish line is nowhere in sight. You doubt yourself. You wonder if it’s worth it. You stall.

It turns out there’s behavioral research that explains exactly why we lose motivation in this murky middle. The problem isn’t willpower, lack of skills, or fatigue. It’s something more fundamental — a predictable pattern in how our brains perceive progress. Researchers call it getting stuck in the middle.

In this post, I’ll explore why motivation collapses at the midpoint of our goals, the behavioral research behind it, and practical strategies for designing your way through the valley. This is the companion piece to my earlier post on the ostrich problem where we explored why we avoid checking our progress. This post is about that valley — why it exists, what it feels like, and how to climb out.

The Classic Theory (and Why It’s Incomplete)

Pursuing goals often seems like a straightforward process. We imagine the pursuit of goals as a linear pull toward the finish line: the closer we get, the more motivated we are to finish. In psychology, this idea is called the goal-gradient hypothesis and was first proposed by Clark Hull in 1932. Hull observed that rats in a maze ran faster as they approached the food. The closer the reward, the harder they pushed. It makes intuitive sense, and decades of research have confirmed the basic pattern in humans too.

But if this were the whole story, why do we seem to inevitably get stuck? Why does it seem like after making considerable progress and sticking to a habit, we stumble, reach a lull, and lose steam? Strangely, this doesn’t happen at the beginning or the end — but somewhere in the middle. If motivation simply increased as we approached our goal, this shouldn’t happen. Something else must be going on.

Think about training for a marathon. Getting started feels exciting — the first several training runs are really affirming. You’ve got a new routine and you’re making tangible gains. The last few weeks before race day bring a new level of focus, excitement, and even adrenaline. But somewhere around week 8 of 16, you’re just… running. The novelty has worn off and race day is still months away.

The U-Curve: Every Goal Has a Crux

We tend to think of goals like hiking up a mountain: just keep walking uphill until you reach the summit. But a better metaphor, especially for the middle, is rock climbing. You’re on the wall. You can’t see the top or the bottom clearly. The next handhold isn’t obvious. Your body is in between positions, uncomfortable, and you aren’t sure of your next move. You’re not lost. You’re stuck.

In climbing, the hardest move on a route is called “the crux.” It’s almost always in the middle, not at the top. Experienced climbers expect this and prepare for it. By contrast, most goal pursuers don’t anticipate or prepare for the middle. We underestimate the difficulty of the middle, because we assume that we’ve already figured out the basics and have some progress to show.

Behavioral research suggests every goal pursuit has a crux too.

Motivation during goal pursuit doesn’t follow a linear path. Instead, it follows a U-shaped curve. Motivation is highest at the beginning and end, lowest in the middle.

The motivation U-curve: highest at the start and end, lowest in the middle. (Based on Bonezzi et al., 2011)

Whether it was training for a marathon or working on an album, this parallels my own lived experience midway in pursuit of these goals. It’s at the midway point where I lose momentum, emotions shift, and my path ahead becomes cloudy. I just never could put my finger on what was going on or even why. In 2011, Bonezzi and colleagues discovered why.

Motivation comes down to how we measure progress and, in particular, which reference point we use for comparing how much progress we are making (or not making). We adopt one of two reference frames:

To-Date Frame (Looking Backward): This is our starting reference point when we’re early in a goal. Each step feels meaningful, because we are close to where we started and comparative progress is noticeable. If we just started training for a marathon, each day we run feels like significant improvement. Early in our goal pursuit, the to-date frame heightens our motivation, and we can say with confidence, “Look how far I’ve come!”
To-Go Frame (Looking Forward): This is the frame of reference when the finish line or end point of our goal is what is pulling at us. For marathon training or even during a race, each step feels like we are closing the gap of the remaining distance, and we say to ourselves, “I’m almost there!”

Imagine you’re reading a 500-page book. When you reach page 51, after reading 50 pages, it feels like real progress. It’s a 1:50 ratio. By contrast, when you read page 201, after 200 pages, this feels like nothing. And, in fact, it’s a meager 1:200 ratio. You are reading the same page in both cases. But the perceived value of a page read and your progress has shifted. It doesn’t feel like you are making quite the same amount of progress.

For the to-date frame, each unit of progress feels smaller and smaller compared to the pile. Your motivation slowly decays. For the to-go frame, each unit of progress dramatically reduces the percentage of the remaining distance, and motivation can surge as we near the target — much like the final sprint toward the finish line or the final pages of a book.

Humans naturally adopt the closest standard of reference. At the beginning of a goal, the starting line is closest, so we use a to-date frame. Near the end, the finish line is closest, so we switch to a to-go frame. It’s at the midpoint where we stall. We’re far from both reference points. Looking back, our progress feels tiny compared to what we’ve done. Looking forward, the finish line is still far away. Neither frame provides motivational fuel. This is the valley — the U-shaped motivation curve. It’s during this transition between frames of reference that we get “stuck in the middle.”

Getting stuck at the midpoint of a project or goal isn’t a failure of willpower, personality, or character. This is the crux — for climbers and for goal pursuers alike. You’ve reached a point of demotivation and uncertainty, equidistant between the start and the finish. It’s a natural progression where two reference frames on progress collide, and neither one works. It’s not that the work is hardest at the midpoint — it’s that our perception of progress is at its weakest. Both the push and the pull have gone quiet.

What the Middle Feels Like: Torn Between Continuing and Quitting

“Don’t turn left,” were the words I repeated to myself as I passed the midway point of my first marathon. I had only started running about a year before the event, and this first marathon took place in my hometown at the time. I was filled with emotions of gratitude, surprise and positivity as I met a small group of my neighbors with a banner and cheering me on at the midpoint, just a few blocks from my house. But as I turned the corner and headed slightly uphill, my heart sunk a bit and a wave of fatigue and uncertainty struck me. The finish line was still two hours away and I was tired.

Have you ever been halfway through something important — a project, a degree, a creative work, a relationship — and doubted yourself and felt the pull to quit and walk away? Not necessarily because you couldn’t do it but because the goal just felt… empty?

Psychologists call this an action crisis. An action crisis is the state of being torn between continuing to pursue a goal and giving up entirely. It’s a feeling of ambivalence. You aren’t fully quitting nor are you totally committed to pushing through either. It’s a limbo state that consumes energy and sucks at you emotionally.

An action crisis develops from two sources: decreased attainability (you’re not sure how to keep going) and decreased desirability (the goal doesn’t feel worth the remaining effort). Both hit hardest at the midpoint.

At my album 7 midpoint, I’d argue that I was less blocked by desirability since I still wanted to do it. Instead, I was stalled by attainability. I had over forty candidate tracks but no idea which to finish. I also doubted certain abilities (imposter syndrome) and doing another album felt more like another obligation in a period of too many obligations.

I was still vaguely saying that I was working on my next album but I really wasn’t. Besides not doing any form of meaningful reviewing or reworking, I had stopped checking my album tracking spreadsheet. The midpoint is also when monitoring goal progress feels least rewarding — which is exactly where I was, like an ostrich sticking my head in the sand.

Whether you experience an action crisis often comes down to why you’re pursuing the goal in the first place. Researchers distinguish between “want-to” goals — chosen freely because they reflect your authentic values — and “have-to” goals — pursued in response to external demands or internal pressure. Have-to goals are more prone to action crises and your uncertainty and lack of value-alignment typically makes them harder to overcome. By contrast, want-to goals resist action crises.

This isn’t just good explanation or theory. In controlled experiments, 75% of participants naturally switched their progress-monitoring frame right at the midpoint, confirming that the U-curve isn’t a choice but an automatic cognitive shift (Bonezzi et al., 2011). We adopt different reference points to monitor progress at different stages, and our motivation shifts as a function of the perceived marginal value of our progress.

Interestingly, researchers found this pattern is goal-specific, not personal. In a separate study tracking personal goals, 87.1% of the variance in whether someone experienced an action crisis depended on the specific goal, not the person (Holding et al., 2017). Regardless of your personality type, if you actually care and value a specific goal or project, then you have a higher probability of overcoming these obstacles and pushing through the feeling of being stuck in the middle. It’s the goal and your relationship to it that matter more than some character flaw or self-limiting belief about persistence or failure.

Which raises a practical question: if getting stuck in the middle is normal and even predictable, how can we prepare for it and navigate it the same way a climber prepares for the crux on the way up a wall?

Two Valleys, Two Solutions

Failure is obvious. Progress, or lack of, is quiet, subtle and often hard to detect. While I was examining my time logs and journal entries for my latest album, I discovered not just one valley but, in fact, two distinct valleys, and each required a different kind of intervention.

My first valley (Aug-Oct, 10→26h, 1.6h/wk) was characterized by low engagement, minimal reviews and a general lack of effort. It wasn’t fun either. You can’t move a goal forward without putting time and energy into it. And you rarely can use willpower alone to work on something you aren’t enjoying. Fortunately, this first valley was broken by returning to Los Angeles and the social energy of collaboration. My primary music collaborator Jacob showed up, and three Saturday sessions anchored November. While the burst was mostly jamming and song-writing, rather than reworking and revisions, it rebuilt momentum and excitement for the material and built up even better initial tracks for the album project overall. It wasn’t work; it was fun.

My second valley (Dec, 47→56h, 1.7h/wk) coincided with a December work push and end-of-year travels. I definitely needed a break and some time to reflect. As January and a new year started, this particular “stuck in the middle” valley was broken by a more explicit realization that I needed structure, a schedule, and time commitments. Instead of generic “Music Production,” I named my sessions (“Album 7 Reworking”). I did regular planning check-in’s and project reflections, so each week had clearer intentions. I also set weekly time goals and got more consistent on when and where each week I’d work on the album. I scheduled time with collaborators for recordings and solo time for music production. Using my tracking spreadsheet, I implemented revision sprints V0→V1→V2 where I reviewed tracks, made cuts, took notes and revised song by song.

Looking back, I’d distill what worked into a few principles:

Make it social. Feedback, collaboration and accountability can get you out of your head, break isolation, and make it fun again. When you are stuck, schedule time with a friend to share what you are going through and break the lull with community.
Shrink the middle. You are going to get stuck, but by breaking goals into sub-sprints, you’re never far from a fresh start or motivating finish. By breaking up the work, you’re effectively designing for natural cycles for planning, reflecting and doing.
Reframe early. Remember to switch to a to-go framing before any natural midpoints. This can help you overcome the emotional lull, avoid falling into a rut, and identify a better progress indicator. “3 tracks left” feels more motivating than “7 tracks done.”
Design monitoring for the midpoint. You should check in more frequently during the middle, not less. We often invest a lot of energy into goal setting and planning but forget to reflect later on, often resulting in burying our head in the sand and not seeking out information that can actively help us in our goal pursuits. Name your sessions. Add planning check-ins. Design unique ways to make the path your own. One’s ability to reflect on what you are feeling, reframe obstacles into opportunities and keep going is what separates endless starters from productive finishers.
Track your progress in visible and fun ways. Emotions are a big part of any goal pursuit or creative challenge. I rate my album tracks with hotdog emojis instead of five stars. I know it sounds silly, but it makes rating feel playful instead of judgmental. Check-in’s and progress tracking doesn’t have to be heavy or complex. Change the emotional frame from judgment to play. Make check-in’s simple and routine, and you’ll improve your chances at sustaining progress-enhancing efforts.

Read the wall before and as you climb. Good rock climbers don’t depend purely on strength and skill to survive the crux. Instead, they plan rest positions and pause and assess at these challenging midpoints, before committing to these critical moves. Like rock climbers, goal pursuers need to read the wall as they climb it and know that the middle is coming. By designing your monitoring, setting up your milestones, and positioning your support, you can navigate the crux instead of being stopped by it.

Hour 121: Reading the Wall

For my next album, I’m at hour 121 now. On average my past albums took around 160 hours, so I’m about 25% away from being finished. I’m producing 5+ hours a week of focused reworking, which was 0 hours/week during my stuck periods. The tracklist is nearly settled at 16 tracks (v4). v5 coming together: 7 songs are being mixed, 9 are in a final push in recording/production phases, and ~38 tasks remain.

The middle wasn’t one valley. It was two, and each demanded a different approach to break through. The first time, a friend showed up, renewing my confidence, carrying some of the creative load, and providing meaningful feedback and accountability. The second time, I restructured the work and the path ahead, so each week was contributing an impactful area and navigating the project through multiple revisions and multiple phases of “done.” Neither one was about willpower. It was about showing up and making progress.

The research calls this the motivation U-curve, a predictable collapse at the midpoint where neither looking back nor looking forward provides fuel. It’s compounded by action crises, where attainability and desirability both waver, and our goals feel empty and our passion decreases. This is made worse by the ostrich instinct — we stop monitoring progress exactly when monitoring matters most. But the data also show that this faltering middle is largely goal-specific, not a personality flaw. If you care deeply about your goal, you shouldn’t blame yourself, your willpower, or lament how impossible the goal appears. Instead, recognize it as a natural phenomenon and design your own solution and path forward.

Every goal pursuit will hit a valley, a stuck in the middle lull, a crux. You’ll get frustrated, you’ll doubt yourself and the meaning of your goal, and even consider retreating and quitting. The question isn’t if you’ll hit it, because you will; but whether you’ll recognize it, read the wall and keep climbing.

References

Bonezzi, A., Brendl, C. M., & De Angelis, M. (2011). Stuck in the middle: The psychophysics of goal pursuit. Psychological Science, 22(5), 607-612.
Holding, A. C., Hope, N. H., Harvey, B., Marion Jetten, A. S., & Koestner, R. (2017). Stuck in limbo: Motivational antecedents and consequences of experiencing action crises in personal goal pursuit. Journal of Personality, 85(6), 893-905.
Hull, C. L. (1932). The goal-gradient hypothesis and maze learning.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with editing, structural organization and clarity. Illustrations were generated with NotebookLM/Gemini. Cover image was generated with Gemini and edited by the author.

Mark Koester

Palm Tree Party by Stellar Mammals: My Seventh Music Album Release

Release Notes

Palm Tree Party Music Videos:

Track List

Liner Notes from LosA

Collaborators / Attribution

Artist and Producer Notes from Stellar Mammals / Mark Koester

About the Album

Track Highlights from Mark

Your Previous Album Isn’t Going to Write the Next One

You Can’t Finish What You Haven’t Decided

The Mixing Gap and the Album’s Choice Point

Six Things I Learned Mixing My Own Album

The Machinery of Finishing

Collaboration

Creativity, Production and Time Tracking

On Finishing

About Stellar Mammals

About the Artists

Rocks on the Sledge: Scott, Amundsen, and the Races Within the Race to the South Pole

The Frames: Which Game Are You Playing?

“Science Would Have to Look After Itself”

Frames Have Authors

Two Games at Once: Always a Game You’re Winning

The Game Was Choosable: A Live Donkey or a Dead Lion?

Which Game Are You Racing?

Related Reading

Sources

The Unemployed Explorer: Panda Lady Ruth Harkness Won Her Goal but Never Claimed Her Second Act

The Lady and the Panda: From Widowed Dressmaker to World-Famous Explorer

Three Endings Offered

The Triumph: Spring 1937

The Redemption: Summer 1938

The Tragedy: Late 1938 to 1947

Living the Question: How Do You End a Chapter?

The Unemployed Explorer and the Hunt After the Hunt

Related Reading

Sources

What If Daily Progress Is the Real Motivator? Book Notes on The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile & Steven Kramer

My Quick Take Book Review

What I Got Out of This Book

Background: Teresa Amabile, the Diary Study and Our Inner Work Life

Our Best Work Days Happen When We Make Progress

Progress in Meaningful Work as THE Daily Motivator

Self-Aware Progress Tracking Practice: My Lived Application of the Progress Principle

Concluding Thought: How to Live the Progress Principle

[Bonus] The Reflection Journey Template I Built From This Book

Related Reading

References

Is This the Long Middle or the Desperate End? What Greely's Arctic Expedition Teaches Us about the Uncertainty of Goal Pursuit

The Greely Expedition: What We Know Now

Seas of Ambiguity: Three Moments of Navigating Phase Identification

Living the Question: Long Middle or Desperate End?

At the Farthest North

Related Reading

Sources

What if I Had to Only Choose One Thing? Book Notes and Reflections on Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

My Quick Take Review

What I Got Out of This Book

Diagnosis: The Pseudo-Productivity Trap

Newport’s Prescription: Slow Productivity in a Nutshell

The Four Words I’m Carrying Out

Do Fewer Things

Higher Quality

Finish (at a natural pace)

Seasonality Reframe: A closing thought

Related Reading

80 Hours, 9 Posts: What a 7-Week Writing Sprint Taught Me

The Experiment: Campaign-based Goal Tracker for Writing

The Numbers

What I Published

What Worked and What I learned

1. The ultradian sweet spot

2. Protect the morning block

3. One post, one day

4. Two blogs created natural variety

5. Book reviews are the fastest format

6. Smart notes are fuel, especially for low-energy days

What I’d Do Differently