One of the most repeated pieces of advice in business and personal development is simple enough:

“Surround yourself with smarter people.”

It sounds good. It flatters ambition. It suggests that your future depends on upgrading the average IQ or success level in your WhatsApp groups.

Over the years, though, I’ve come to realise that this advice is incomplete. Often, it pushes people deeper into the very traps they’re trying to escape: burnout, golden handcuffs, status games that leave them quietly empty.

I think there’s a better version of this advice:

Don’t just surround yourself with smarter people. Surround yourself with people who are free in different ways than you are.

This idea sits at the core of how I think about life design, and it’s also the core design principle behind The Good Life Collective (GLC), the private community I run.

Two Kinds of Freedom

When I say “free”, I’m not talking about passports, politics, or being able to work from a laptop on a beach.

I’m talking about the room you actually have to move inside your own life.

In practice, I see two very different kinds of freedom:

1. Freedom to win.

This is the one most people optimise for. You pick a game—your career, a business, a public profile, a net worth target—and you get very good at winning inside that game. You learn the rules, acquire leverage, build skills, and improve your position.

If you surround yourself with “smarter people” in the conventional sense, this is usually what you’re buying: better tactics, sharper thinking, insider knowledge. You become more effective at the current game.

2. Freedom to keep playing.

This one is quieter and more important. It’s the ability to zoom out of the current game entirely:

• to walk away from a path that no longer makes sense, even if you’re “winning” on paper
• to change countries, careers, or identities without your life collapsing
• to spot when a game is slowly destroying your health, relationships, or sanity—and actually change course

You can be highly free inside a narrow game and almost totally unfree outside it. Think of the executive who is unbeatable in meetings, but genuinely cannot imagine a life without their title. Or the entrepreneur who can pull off million-euro deals, but is incapable of slowing down long enough to actually enjoy any of it.

On paper, they’re powerful. In reality, they are trapped by their own success.

How We Fall Asleep Inside a Game

Most of us never consciously choose our main game. We slide into it.

You get good at something, opportunities appear, money and status follow, and before you know it, your entire life is organised around one scoreboard: revenue, valuation, salary, number of properties, number of followers, whatever.

At first, it’s energising. You’re progressing. The numbers are going up. People around you approve.

Then, slowly, the walls close in:

• you filter people based on whether they help or hinder that one metric
• you stop doing things that don’t “move the needle”
• you treat anything that doesn’t fit the game as a distraction or a threat

At some point, the game becomes invisible. It stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like “just how life is”. That’s what I mean by falling asleep inside a game.

Now imagine you take the classic advice literally and “surround yourself with smarter people” who are all playing the same game as you, just a bit better.

You’ll get sharper. You’ll get richer. You’ll pick up advanced tactics. But you’ll also share the same blind spots, the same unexamined trade-offs, and the same silent fears.

You all get better at winning. None of you get better at asking whether this is a game still worth playing.

What Differently Free People Look Like

This is where the idea of differently free people comes in.

A differently free person isn’t just “smarter”. They’ve escaped a trap you’re still in, or they’re willing to pay costs you’re not yet willing to pay, in exchange for a kind of freedom you haven’t prioritised.

Their life doesn’t fit your script, and that’s the whole point.

You’ll recognise them because their choices make you pause:

• You’re obsessed with efficiency; they leave deliberate empty space in their week and guard it like a hawk.
• You’re focused on accumulating more; they walked away from “more” and are clearly lighter and happier.
• You’re chasing visibility; they choose depth over reach and are uninterested in being known at scale.

Under your current logic, some of their decisions look irrational. But you can’t dismiss them, because the results are undeniably real: they’re calm where you’re anxious, present where you’re split in ten directions, rooted where you’re constantly drifting.

This isn’t about copying their life. It’s about letting their way of living expose the invisible walls of your own.

Why I Built the GLC Around This Idea

The Good Life Collective wasn’t created as a generic “networking group” or a fan club. It’s a deliberate attempt to assemble high-agency people who are playing different games, at a similar level of seriousness, and keep them in conversation long enough for their freedoms to rub off on each other.

Within the GLC, you will find these kinds of profiles:

• someone who sold a business early, and consciously chose a slower, more grounded life instead of chasing the next big exit
• someone who optimises everything around being an involved parent, even if it means saying no to prestigious opportunities
• someone who moved countries two or three times to build a legal and lifestyle setup that actually matches their values
• someone who is “under-earning” relative to what they could command, because they refuse to sacrifice health or freedom of time

On paper, they’re all “smart”. In practice, what matters is that each of them is free in a way the others are not.

Put them in the same room, and something interesting happens:

• the entrepreneur who only thinks in terms of net worth starts to see the cost in terms of time with kids, stress, and fragility
• the person who over-indexes on safety starts to see how much opportunity and aliveness they’ve been leaving on the table
• the restless nomad sees, up close, the long-term richness of deep roots and long-standing relationships

Nobody is held up as “the correct template”. Instead, each person makes different options visible. You’re exposed to freedoms you didn’t know how to value before.

Freedom, Family, and the Long Game

A recurring theme in our conversations inside the GLC is the tension between work, family, and the long game.

Many members are in the thick of it: young kids, demanding businesses, geographical moves, ageing parents, changing tax regimes. It’s very easy to slip into a quiet story that says, “I’ll sacrifice now, and later I’ll be free.”

On a spreadsheet, that story is neat. In real life, it’s messy. Time with kids doesn’t come back. Health doesn’t magically restore itself on command. Relationships don’t pause gracefully while you chase a number.

When you sit with people at different stages of the journey, the trade-offs become more real. You hear from those who over-invested in work and now live with a sense of having missed something important. You hear from those who protected family time and see what that bought them. You hear from people who tried to do everything at once and hit a wall.

Again, there’s no single right answer. But your decisions stop being theoretical. You’re not optimising your life in isolation. You’re learning directly from the consequences other people have already lived through.

That’s what I mean by freedom to keep playing. You’re designing your life so that 10, 20, 30 years from now, you’re still in the game with your health, relationships, and sense of self intact—not just with a nice financial statement.

Beware the “I’m Above All Games” Trap

There is another pattern worth mentioning.

Once you see that any particular game can trap you, it’s tempting to swing to the other extreme and never fully commit to anything. You become a permanent observer:
always exploring, always keeping options open, never going all in.

That, too, is a game.

Refusing to choose is still a choice. Floating above the concrete realities of work, family, money, and place might feel clever, but it usually leads to drift and a low-grade dissatisfaction that never resolves into anything solid.

The goal is not to avoid all finite games. The goal is to play them deeply, but stay awake to the fact that they are games—and to maintain enough inner and outer freedom to change course without blowing up your life.

In my experience, you don’t develop that kind of awareness in isolation. You develop it in conversation with people whose games and freedoms don’t match your own.

The Upgrade: From “Smarter” to “Differently Free”

So let’s come back to that original line:

“Surround yourself with smarter people.”

It’s not wrong. But on its own, it’s shallow.

If you only follow that advice, you’ll end up extremely good at one thing and oddly fragile everywhere else. You’ll be free to win inside a narrow game and unfree everywhere outside it.

The upgrade looks like this:

Surround yourself with people who are free in ways you’re not.

People whose lives don’t fit your template. People whose choices confuse you at first, then quietly expand your idea of what’s possible.

By all means, learn from people who are “smarter” in your field. But don’t stop there. Find the ones who are calm where you’re restless, brave where you’re cautious, rooted where you’re scattered. Let their freedoms challenge your defaults.

Over time, that mix is what protects you from winning the wrong game.

I’ve spent years arguing about things that didn’t matter to people who weren’t listening.

It took me until my forties to fully see the pattern. Something would happen in the world—political, cultural, professional. I’d have a strong opinion about it. I’d share that opinion, sometimes with arguments, sometimes just with contempt.

Then I’d move on. But the impression I made stayed with the people who heard me.

This played out everywhere: at dinner parties, in group chats, at family gatherings, in professional settings, and especially on social media. Someone would bring up a controversial topic. I’d weigh in—sometimes forcefully, sometimes dismissively.

Eventually, as I sat down one day to run some analytics and cleanup on my X/Twitter account using AI, I asked myself: what did any of it accomplish?

The Uncomfortable Math

Minds changed: Essentially zero.

Has anyone ever changed their position because someone called them naive, blind, or stupid? That has never happened. People don’t update their beliefs because someone was louder or more contemptuous. If anything, they dig in harder.

Persuasion doesn’t work through force. It works through trust, patience, and genuine curiosity. A hot take has none of those.

Relationships affected: More than I realised.

Some people argue back. Most don’t. They quietly adjust how they see you. Not as someone with interesting views—as someone who can’t help themselves. Someone to be careful around. Someone who makes gatherings tense.

You won’t get feedback on this. People don’t announce that they’ve downgraded you in their mind. They just stop calling.

Opportunities lost: Unknown, but not zero.

In professional contexts, the stakes are higher. Potential clients, partners, employers, collaborators—they form impressions quickly. A reputation for being argumentative or contemptuous follows you in ways you can’t track. Doors close silently.

Satisfaction gained: Brief and hollow.

The feeling of being heard, of having said your piece, lasts seconds. The consequences last much longer.

The Name-Calling Trap

When you disagree with someone, there’s a temptation to escalate. Not just to argue the point, but to characterise the person: idiot, sheep, clown.

It feels efficient. It communicates contempt without requiring you to engage with their position.

But here’s what it really communicates: that you’ve run out of argument. That when frustrated, you reach for insults. That you see people who disagree with you as beneath respect.

Calling someone a clown doesn’t make them look like a clown. It makes you look like someone who calls people clowns. Everyone listening notices, even if they don’t say so.

The Certainty Trap

Nothing ages worse than predictions made with confidence.

Every time you declare that something will definitely happen, that a trend is unstoppable, that anyone who disagrees is blind—you’re creating a record. The future has a way of humbling the certain.

It’s not just financial predictions. It’s political predictions. Cultural predictions. Predictions about technology, relationships, how situations will unfold.

Being confident feels like being informed. Often it’s just being loud. The difference only becomes clear in hindsight—when you’re the one who was wrong.

The Illusion of Action

Part of why we argue about big topics is that it feels like doing something.

You see something unfair or stupid. You react. You speak up, share your take, make your position known. There’s a sense of having participated, of not staying silent in the face of wrongness.

But nothing has actually moved. The thing you’re angry about continues unchanged. The people you’re criticising don’t know or care. You’ve spent energy and emotional bandwidth, and the only concrete result is how others now perceive you.

Expression is not execution. Venting is not action. Feeling like you did something is not the same as doing something.

If you actually want to change something, that takes quiet, sustained effort—not public commentary.

The Acceptance That Changed Everything

Somewhere around forty, something shifted.

I accepted that many things in life are broken. Some ideologies are incoherent. Some systems are corrupt. Some people will always believe things I find absurd, and they’ll believe them passionately and permanently.

And I can’t do anything about it.

Not through arguments. Not through hot takes. Not through calling out the wrongness for everyone to see.

Once I accepted that, a strange thing happened: the urge to engage started to fade. Not because I stopped caring, but because I stopped pretending that my commentary would change anything. The world will continue being messy and irrational whether I weigh in or not.

That’s not cynicism. It’s clarity.

Where the Frustration Goes

Staying quiet doesn’t mean suppressing everything. That just breeds resentment.

The frustration needs somewhere to go. For me, it’s a small circle of close friends—people who think similarly, who won’t turn a vent session into a debate, who have the emotional intelligence to offer perspective when I need it and simply listen when I don’t. Some are older and more experienced, able to offer another angle with tact. Others just let me get it out of my system without adding fuel to the fire.

I also built a private community for this purpose: The Good Life Collective. It’s a place where I can share thoughts that previously would have gone on a public platform—but with people who are more aligned with my thinking. It makes no sense to broadcast opinions to a public audience full of strangers who are fundamentally different from you and will only be enraged by anything you say. And vice versa. A curated space changes everything.

The difference between a private outlet and a public broadcast is enormous. In a trusted circle, you can say what you actually think. You can be wrong, be angry, be unfiltered. You can work through your reaction without it becoming your permanent public record.

Find people like this. Share your frustrations with them. Save the public-facing version of yourself for things that actually matter.

When It Is Worth Speaking Up

I’m not arguing for silence in all situations.

There are moments when staying quiet is cowardice—when someone’s being mistreated in front of you, when your expertise is genuinely needed, when your silence would be complicity. And there are times when speaking up—even publicly, even passionately—is exactly the right thing to do.

Years ago, I wrote a long article about why I left Malta. It was personal, detailed, and critical of the place I grew up. I didn’t hold back. And unlike a reactive hot take, that piece resonated. It has hundreds of comments from people who felt the same way, who needed to hear that they weren’t alone in their frustrations, who used it to help make their own decisions about whether to stay or leave.

What made it different? It was thoughtful. It came from lived experience, not a reaction to something I saw online. It was about something I had standing to speak on. It wasn’t name-calling or contempt—it was an honest reckoning with a place and a culture I knew deeply.

Being vocal about problems in Malta was met with resistance at the time. People tried to shut me down, told me I was being negative, that things weren’t so bad. But I kept speaking up, and eventually I left. That decision was one of the best I ever made. Sometimes the resistance you encounter is a sign that you’re touching something real.

The goal isn’t to have no opinions or to become someone who never speaks up. It’s to be intentional. To distinguish between the urge to be heard and the situations that genuinely require your voice.

Most controversies don’t need you. A few will. Know the difference.

What Doesn’t Compound

I think a lot about where to put my energy—what compounds over time and what dissipates.

Arguing about big topics doesn’t compound in any direction that matters. It doesn’t improve your health. It doesn’t build wealth. It doesn’t deepen your relationships. It doesn’t make you wiser.

At best, it’s neutral. At worst, it actively degrades the things you care about—your reputation, your relationships, your peace of mind.

The things that do compound are quieter: building something, learning something, strengthening the bonds with people you actually know. None of that requires public commentary on whatever controversy is dominating the discourse this week.

What I’ve Learned

Having opinions is fine. Broadcasting them is optional.

You can think something without saying it. You can believe someone is wrong without announcing it. Your opinions don’t require an audience.

Arguing about big topics rarely changes anything.

On divisive issues, people aren’t looking to be persuaded. They’re looking for validation or a fight. You’re not going to change minds with a hot take. You’re just going to reveal how you behave when you disagree.

Contempt is expensive.

Dismissing people as idiots or sheep feels satisfying in the moment. But it marks you as someone who reaches for insults when frustrated. That reputation is hard to shake.

Anger is a signal, not a script.

Frustration tells you something matters to you. It doesn’t obligate you to broadcast that frustration. You can feel something strongly without performing it.

Certainty ages poorly.

The more confident you are, the more embarrassing it is when you’re wrong. And you will be wrong more often than you expect.

The costs are invisible.

You won’t get a notification when someone decides not to work with you, not to invite you, not to trust you. The downside of running your mouth is almost impossible to measure. That makes it easy to ignore—and dangerous to underestimate.

Silence is underrated.

You don’t have to weigh in on everything. The arguments will continue without you. Your silence costs nothing. Your words might cost more than you’ll ever know.

The Question

Before weighing in on any controversial topic, I now ask myself:

What does this accomplish besides making me feel heard?

If the answer is nothing, I stay quiet.

The world doesn’t need my take on every controversy. My relationships don’t benefit from my political opinions. And calling someone a clown has never once made them less of one.

Some lessons take longer than they should.

There is more competition than ever in almost every industry. AI tools are cheap, distribution is wide open, and barriers to entry keep falling. Yet despite all this, most products, services, and organisations still feel painfully mediocre.

You feel it as a customer. Broken flows. Slow support. Rules that exist to protect process rather than people. Everyone is busy, yet almost nothing feels owned.

And this is the strange part.

For all the talk about saturated markets, the day‑to‑day experience of trying to give people money has never been worse.

How Businesses Actually Die

There was a restaurant I used to love. Nothing fancy. The food was solid, the room felt warm, and the owner knew half the regulars by name. Then, slowly, something shifted.

The playlist changed from relaxed background music to loud, jarring tracks that made conversation awkward. Tables were no longer wiped properly between guests. You would wait five minutes before anyone acknowledged you at the door. Dishes came out with missing sides and no explanation.

Nobody was rude. Nobody was dramatic.

They just stopped paying attention.

Within a year the place felt empty even on weekends. Not because a better restaurant opened next door, but because the relationship with the customer had quietly died.

That is what people mistake for “brutal competition”.

The Care Failure

The same pattern shows up in products.

Take the current generation of e‑ink notebooks. Montblanc sells a digital notebook as a luxury object. It looks beautiful and is priced accordingly. Yet the software is barely updated, support is thin, and customers are given a single gigabyte of cloud storage.

Not because storage is expensive in 2026, but because somewhere along the line nobody stood in the customer’s shoes and asked what living with this product actually feels like.

This is not a technical failure.

It is a care failure.

Where Agency Actually Disappears

High agency does not vanish through policy. It erodes through tiny choices.

The email you notice and decide to answer tomorrow.
The UX bug you see and assume someone else will fix.
The frustrated customer whose problem becomes an internal status update.

None of these moments feel important. But each one teaches the same lesson: do not touch what you do not own.

Over time, people stop even seeing the problem.

The Invisible Compounding Advantage

This is why working hard is not the same as having agency.

Low agency often looks like productivity: full calendars, long threads, beautifully documented processes that carefully avoid the one uncomfortable decision that would have fixed the issue.

Striving for excellence is not harsh. It is empathy made operational. You remove friction because you imagine the person on the other side of the screen. You polish details because small annoyances ruin real days. You follow up because you care how the story ends.

Some thinkers have long argued that systems decay when individuals stop being treated as the primary source of value. When responsibility is detached from authority, people do not rebel. They protect themselves by lowering their standards.

The advantage of high agency is that it compounds invisibly. Every fast reply trains customers to expect care. Every micro‑fix trains teams to notice problems earlier. Every avoided escalation saves leadership hours that quietly accumulate into strategic clarity.

This is not culture.

It is financial arbitrage hidden in plain sight.

The Standard

Most companies are not constrained by ideas, tools, or talent. They are constrained by the absence of ownership.

So the real question is not whether your market is too crowded. It is where you are making it hard for people to give you money. Where friction lingers because nobody has claimed it. Where you are waiting for permission when you already have the power to act.

I do not accept systems that make it hard for people to care. I do not tolerate friction I am capable of fixing. I assume ownership until someone explicitly takes it from me.

That standard is high agency in action. And it is how you win.

One phrase captures how I approach life, work, and investing: long-term optimist, short-term pessimist.

At first glance it looks contradictory. In reality, it is the only mindset that makes sense in a world that is full of opportunity yet constantly shaken by shocks.

Why the Long-Term Optimist View

Across centuries the trend is clear. Technology, health, communication, and living standards have all moved upward. Innovation compounds. Human ingenuity adapts to crises. The trajectory has always bent upward despite wars, pandemics, or recessions.

That gives me confidence that, on a multi-decade horizon, being optimistic about humanity, markets, and personal growth is rational. I expect better tools, healthier lives, and new opportunities for my children. That optimism guides how I invest, the projects I build, and the risks I take.

Why the Short-Term Pessimist View

Zoom in and the picture changes. Cycles matter. Markets overshoot. Politicians stumble. Companies fail. Supply chains break. Human error repeats itself.

Assuming smooth sailing is dangerous. I expect setbacks, volatility, and disappointments. I prepare for them by keeping buffers, diversifying, and questioning hype. In business and investing, this means stress-testing assumptions, protecting the downside, and expecting things to go wrong before they go right.

The Problem With Long-Term Pessimists

Where I part ways with many people today is with long-term pessimists. They come in different guises. Some are AI doomers convinced artificial intelligence will end humanity. Others are climate catastrophists certain that environmental collapse is around the corner. Then there are the anti-natalists who call it irresponsible to bring children into the world at all. In finance you see it in the FIRE community’s perma-savers, people who cling to austerity while denying themselves life’s richness. Politically it often shows up in progressive declinists, convinced society is spiraling down.

A Short History of Failed Long-Term Pessimism

This mindset is not new. Every generation has had its prophets of decline, and they have always been wrong.

• Malthusian collapse (18th–19th century). Thomas Malthus warned that population growth would outstrip food supply. Instead, agricultural innovation and later the Green Revolution produced food surpluses and supported unprecedented population growth.
• Nuclear annihilation (Cold War, mid-20th century). Many were certain a U.S.–Soviet nuclear exchange would end civilization. The risk was real, but deterrence, arms control, and diplomacy kept the peace.
• The Club of Rome (1970s). Limits to Growth predicted resource exhaustion and global economic collapse. Oil reserves expanded, efficiency improved, and recycling reduced scarcity. Growth continued.
• Y2K panic (1999). Headlines warned of systemic collapse as the millennium approached. Billions were spent preparing. Midnight struck and life carried on.
• Financial crisis (2008–2009). The crash was severe, but forecasts of permanent depression and the death of capitalism proved false. Policy response and resilience paved the way for one of the longest bull markets in history.

The pattern is always the same. Pessimists are often right about problems but wrong about outcomes. They underestimate the compounding power of innovation and human adaptability. Betting against the future has never paid off.

The Discipline of My Stance

Holding both optimism and pessimism in tension creates balance. Optimism gives direction. It keeps me building and investing in what matters even when sentiment turns dark. Pessimism enforces discipline. It stops me from getting carried away by short-term enthusiasm or blind to risks.

But I never lose sight of the bigger arc. Collapse narratives are seductive, but they have always been wrong. Hiding has never been a winning strategy.

The Day-to-Day Struggle

This mindset works well in theory, but it is harder to hold in practice. Day to day the world often feels like a circus of incompetence, noise, and bad incentives. Idiotic behavior, short-term greed, and the clownish side of politics and culture can easily drag you down.

This is where Stoicism becomes essential. Marcus Aurelius reminded himself daily that he would meet “the meddling, the ungrateful, the arrogant.” The Stoic stance is to accept that the world is imperfect, that people will fail, and that irritation only adds a second injury to the first.

“You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” —Marcus Aurelius

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” —Seneca

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” —Epictetus

Short-term pessimism acknowledges risk. Stoicism helps you withstand it without bitterness. To stay effective you need both: clear-eyed realism about the daily chaos, and the discipline to keep moving without letting the noise corrode your optimism.

Living It Out

That balance is not abstract for me. It has shaped each stage of my life.

In my twenties I chose to build a business instead of chasing a safe job. It was a long-term bet on myself and on technology.

In my thirties I applied the same mindset to investing. I stayed careful in the short term but convinced that innovation and markets move upward over decades. Not everything went smoothly. When high-risk investments turned against me in 2021 I lost a significant amount. It was a brutal reminder of volatility. But I did not throw in the towel. I did the work to recover through therapy, reflection, and conversations with people I trust. That process strengthened my conviction. Setbacks do not cancel the long-term trajectory; they test whether you can stay in the game.

Having children is another form of long-term optimism. I spend as much time with them as I can, passing on lessons and values I believe will compound in their lives.

Now I am focusing my energy on AI. Where some see risk, I see possibility. It is the next great wave of leverage and productivity.

To help keep this mindset sharp I built the Good Life Collective. It is a space to surround myself with high-agency people who also believe in progress. It keeps me grounded in optimism while also giving me an outlet to air frustrations when the clown world inevitably wears me down.

Why It Matters Now

In today’s environment of fast-moving AI, volatile markets, and shifting geopolitics, being a long-term optimist and short-term pessimist is not just a personal quirk. It is a strategy. Those who are blindly optimistic get wrecked by the next downturn. Those who are long-term pessimists never create or invest in anything that lasts.

The winning path is holding both truths at once.

Short-term pessimism keeps you alive. Long-term optimism makes life worth living. 

Over the years, I’ve come to realize something that’s quietly changed my life: I prefer to be happy than to be right.

It didn’t happen overnight. I’ve always had a sharp mind and a strong opinion about, well, almost everything. I used to thrive on debate, feeling a surge of satisfaction when I could prove a point or win an argument. It wasn’t even about showing off (at least not always). I genuinely believed that being right mattered — that facts and logic were the highest virtues.

But slowly, life taught me otherwise. Not through a single grand epiphany, but through dozens of small, humbling moments. Arguments that lingered longer than they should have. Relationships that felt more strained than supported. A quiet, nagging feeling that even when I won, I lost something.

The truth is, being right can come at a cost — especially when it means making someone else feel wrong. And when that someone is a friend, a partner, a child, or a colleague, the cost often outweighs the benefit.

Choosing happiness doesn’t mean abandoning truth or lowering standards. It means knowing when to let go. It means asking myself: “Is this really worth it? Is the outcome I’m chasing going to bring me peace or just momentary satisfaction?”

These days, I pick my battles more carefully. I listen more. I let others have the last word. Sometimes I even smile and nod, knowing full well I disagree — not out of resignation, but out of love. Out of the understanding that connection matters more than correction.

This doesn’t mean I’m a pushover. I’ll still stand up when it counts. But I’ve learned the wisdom in pausing, in giving space, in prioritizing harmony over ego.

At the end of the day, I’d rather sleep well than feel smug. I’d rather have peace in my home and heart than be crowned the champion of a trivial dispute. And funny enough, the more I’ve leaned into this mindset, the more right my life has felt.

So yes, I still value truth. But I value joy more. I value love more. I value the quiet power of choosing happiness — even when I could have been right.