This Week’s ABC

**Advice: **You always have a choice.

Breakthrough: 3 questions to get Kobe’s mindset.

Challenge: 2 mins that might change your life.

📖 Advice: Are you a victim or a fighter?

I’ve met a lot of people in life.

And I find that people live on a spectrum.

That spectrum depends on who they are, how much work they’ve done on themselves, and how much stress they have at a given time:

Are you a victim?

Or are you a fighter?

Do things happen TO you, and you just complain?

Or do you accept that life IS change, and you own what you can and focus what’s in YOUR control?

Every day, we have a choice.

Nobody will save you. The better you is on the other side of hard things.

And procrastination and avoidance are blocking your path to achieving your goals.

It’s you vs. you at the end of the day.

That’s mental game.

The best winners I’ve seen, pick themselves up when they’re down and go practice their craft anyway. They train themselves to always pick fighter mode.

Because what is totally in your control is your own response and execution.

I know my answer—I’m a goddamn fighter.

I made the basketball team and started the next year because of that mentality.

I love this quote so much I hung it up in my office. Anytime I’m feeling low, I think about it and I get going again.

2024 was a difficult year for many reasons:

• Nibbler passed away tragically
• I went through a breakup
• My brother went missing and had a relapse with schizophrenia
• Getting death threats and personal harassment weekly from my first startup (seriously, I share a bit about it here)
• I dealt with 4 injuries from rock climbing

Through all the hardship:

• I got promoted
• I founded a new venture
• I grew stronger from the hardships, and my capacity for stress increased
• My rock climbing is back on track, and I’m near peak performance again
• I’m honestly happy, grateful for my life, and more resilient than ever

As I reflect on 2024 and grow optimism for 2025, I’m weirdly thankful for the hard lessons learned.

22 year old Robert would not understand this perspective.

And that shows me how much I’ve grown.

I had a therapy session yesterday, and my therapist was concerned about my mental game because of losing Nibbler recently.

He had been my rock for 8 years. I got him at 8 weeks old.

In the past, I’ve faced depression, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, and a low mental state.

I lacked a solid foundation of self-love.

Years ago, I feared that Nibbler’s death would plunge me into depression and despair, leaving me feeling lost. I knew that if all went well, I would outlive him.

I expected to be a disaster when that day came.

However, I’ve navigated this loss with resilience and have leaned into the pain to grieve healthily.

Looking back, I see how much I’ve grown from our time together since I got him as a little pup.

In the past, I dealt with hard times by escaping negative feelings through drugs, alcohol, and partying—short-term distractions that did not address the issues that inundate the soul.

This time, I managed to embrace my grief healthily, so now I can think of him and smile 99.999% of the time.

Instead of letting it paralyze me, I used it as motivation. Nibbler would want his dad to keep being a fighter, not a victim.

So I fight.

In 10 years, I will succeed enough to build a nonprofit in honor of him and his sister Poppy. I want their legacy to be saving other dogs and giving them good homes. Excited to come back to this newsletter (:

Pain, I’ve learned, can become purpose if you know how to transform it.

With that, here’s my schedule this year:

3 AM - 6 AM: epistemicme.ai startup work (Solving AI Alignment with an open source project)

6 AM - 2 PM: Chief Product Architect at Dayforce (Transforming how we do software development at scale across 1600 engineers)

2 PM - 4 PM: Climbing/gym/friends (Combining fitness with social time)

4 PM - 7 PM: More startup work (Because dreams don’t build themselves)

8 PM: Sleep (Recovery is non-negotiable to be at my best… My sleep traditionally has not been good and I’m committed to changing that this year)

Weekends I leave a bit more flexible, with more time for the gym, and more time on Epistemic Me.

This might sound heinous. That’s because it kind of is. (Don’t worry, I’m leaving room for self-care, eating food, exercise, seeing family, this is just the highest level view)

I know exactly what I want out of life, and I am going to work for it.

Nibbler, Poppy—You were there for me. I gotchu.

Your dad is going to continue to train to be a better person, every day, every moment of the day.

And that leads us into the Breakthrough recommendation of the week…

🚀 Breakthrough: 3 Questions To Get Kobe’s Mindset

3 simple questions.

Most people surf through life without fully answering number 1: clarity on what they want, who they want to connect with, where to live, or what to do with life.

My take: We have ONE life, so I spend a LOT of time contemplating how to make the most of it. We are all evolving our understandings of ourselves.

If you don’t know what you want, you don’t know your why.

And if you don’t have that, you will procrastinate and procrastinate.

Here’s a quote on Kobe’s view on work ethic and work schedule:

If your job is to try to be the best basketball player you can be… to do that you have to train as much as you can as often as you can. If you get up at 10 in the morning, train at 12. Train 12 to 2. You have to let your body recover. You eat, you recover. You get back out, you start training again at 6. You train from 6 to 8. And now you go home, you shower, you eat dinner, you go to bed, you wake up, and you did it again. Those are two sessions. Now imagine you wake up at 3, you train at 4. You come home, eat breakfast, relax, then you’re back at it again 9 to 11. Then you’re back at it again 2 to 4. Then you’re back at it again 7 to 9. Look at how much more training I have done by simply starting at 4. If I start earlier, I can do more hours. I know the other guys aren’t doing it. So I know if I keep doing it over time, the gap widens over time. —Kobe Bryant

For Kobe…

“There are athletes who turn up. Then there are athletes who turn up to compete. They try. Then there are athletes who train to win. They train every session to win on match night. Then there are those few athletes who train to dominate. They train so hard, that winning is inevitable.” —Bill Beswick### What did he want?

“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.” —Carl Jung“There’s a 1000 excuses, but not a single reason”—Bill Beswick

1. What do you want?
2. How badly do you want it?
3. How much are you willing to suffer?### How badly did he want it?

He wanted it more than anything. He knew it from a young age. He came to terms with his chosen purpose.

How much was he willing to suffer?

He was very clearly willing to suffer and sacrifice for his dreams. He didn’t care about partying. He didn’t care about distractions. He didn’t care about anything other than the game (for the most part, from what I can tell).

For me…

What do I want?

I want to leave a positive impact on over 1 billion people and the earth that lasts after I’m dead. And I want Nibbler and Poppy’s legacy to be helping other dogs find good homes and create lasting memories.

I want to be the best version of myself I can possibly be (leader, entrepreneur, dog dad, partner, son, brother, etc.), and I believe the journey of these pursuits will get me to him.

How badly do I want it?

Clearly, Kobe wanted to be the best basketball player.