One of the biggest limitations of your future isn’t time, talent, intelligence, or work ethic. It’s exposure which is something far more structural, quiet, and definitive.

Your brain can only set targets for things it knows exist according to an interview I listened to by a neurologist. Every single day, our minds filter through millions of bits of sensory and situational data, desperately trying to decide what is relevant for survival, what is useful for progress, and what is simply background noise. If you have never seen a specific path walked up close, your brain’s gatekeeper, the salience network, simply flags it as background scenery. It ignores the opportunity because it does not recognize it as a viable destination. It assumes the boundary lines of your current environment are the boundary lines of the world. But once you are exposed to something beyond those borders, an immediate shift occurs at a neurological level.

I recently reconnected with an old friend who told me how proud she was of the work I am doing. As we talked, she reflected on the weight of representation, noting that she could only imagine what it meant for others to see someone like me in my position, explicitly breaking down the mechanics of the field and creating an intentional work ecosystem for them. That conversation stayed with me for days because it hits directly at the core of a phrase my mentors used to tell me: You can’t be what you can’t see.

When you see someone who shares your identity, your background, or your struggles thriving in an unfamiliar, high-stakes, or historically exclusive environment, the cognitive friction associated with that space evaporates. The achievement is instantly dragged out of the realm of mythology and dropped squarely into the realm of methodology. It stops looking like an unattainable miracle, and it starts looking like a sequence of repeatable steps. It ceases to be magic and begins to look like a system.

Under these conditions, your brain begins collecting evidence. It starts noticing open doors, hidden levers, and tactical opportunities that were previously invisible or ignored. What was once considered extraordinary or out of reach suddenly becomes possible. The horizon moves because your internal map expanded. Yet, if we stop there, the phrase “you can’t be what you can’t see” inadvertently becomes its own psychological ceiling.

If human ambition were strictly bounded by direct, literal representation, no one would ever be the first to accomplish anything. Every breakthrough in human history would be a logical impossibility. The pioneers of any movement, discipline, or institutional architecture had to look at rooms, industries, and power structures where absolutely no one like them existed, and they had to project themselves into those spaces anyway. They had to operate in a vacuum of precedent.

They achieved this through a cognitive process known as combinatorial creativity. The human brain does not merely mirror what is directly in front of it; it possesses the unique capacity to synthesize fragments of disparate realities. A pioneer does not need a perfect, identical mirror image to build a vision. Instead, they take the grit observed in a family member, the strategic acumen read about in a historical text, and the structural design witnessed in an entirely unrelated industry, and they fuse those pieces together. They construct a composite map for a territory that has never been mapped before.

Exposure, therefore, does not just mean finding a perfect reflection of yourself in a position of leadership. It means aggressively gathering the raw, foundational building blocks of excellence wherever they exist, and having the intellectual agility to assemble them into something entirely new. You do not wait to see yourself in the room; you study the mechanics of the room from the outside so that you can reconfigure it upon entry. There is, however, a critical catch to this dynamic: simply being in the room is never enough.

We often operate under the comforting illusion that environmental exposure automatically triggers transformation, that if we just surround ourselves with high performers, elite institutions, or innovative spaces, osmosis will do the heavy lifting. We assume that standing near power or talent will rewrite our internal programming by default.

But proximity without engagement quickly devolves into passive consumption or inspiration voyeurism. It turns the success of others into a spectator sport. You can sit in the audience of an ecosystem for years, watching the tradecraft of experts up close, without a single synapse changing shape.

True neuroplasticity, the actual, physical rewiring of your neural pathways, is an outcome of friction, not just presence. Your brain does not change when it observes comfort; it changes when it encounters a demand for adaptation. Neurological reorganization requires intense, sustained attention and a high degree of cognitive effort. It demands the release of neuromodulators like epinephrine and acetylcholine, which are only triggered when you are actively wrestling with a problem, taking a calculated risk, or operating at the absolute edge of your current capability.

This means that exposure is merely the spark that alters your internal filter. It opens your eyes to the existence of the game, but it does not give you the skill to play it. Rigorous translation, focused immersion, and relentless execution are what actually build the target. The real rewiring occurs during the awkward, high-friction phase of doing the work, when you are forced to speak a language you haven't mastered, navigate protocols you didn't grow up with, and handle the weight of real responsibility.

The ultimate shift, then, is moving from a passive witness of an environment to an active decoder of it.

When my friend pointed out the impact of providing advice and building an ecosystem, the true breakthrough for the people in that space wasn't just the visual of representation. It was the act of translation. It was taking the unwritten rules, the implicit strategies, and the hidden operational tradecraft of a complex professional world and making them explicit. It was turning an exclusive domain into an accessible curriculum.

By existing transparently in those spaces, you provide the structural blueprint that allows the brains of those around you to start collecting their own evidence. You lower the barrier to entry not by lowering the standard, but by demystifying the path to reaching it.

The prescription for stagnation is simple but uncomfortable: you must deliberately expose yourself to the depth of the environments that intimidate you. Seek out the spaces that make your current assumptions feel small. Stand in rooms where the conversation forces you to stretch, where the expectations are mercilessly high, and where your current toolset feels inadequate.

Do not look at these environments as elite fortresses designed to keep you out; look at them as data-rich fields waiting to be analyzed. Gather the evidence of how things are built, how influence is wielded, and how systems are run. Endure the acute discomfort of being the uninitiated novice in the room. Decode the system from the inside out, master the tradecraft required to operate within it, and then turn around and build the ecosystem that allows those coming behind you to see it, understand it, and surpass it.

Both leftist and rightist theories of government are failing, of course, because they have abandoned the obvious truth that one of the essential core functions of the state is supporting the monasteries.

I have ADHD. Probably.¹

My entire adolescence was defined by forgetting to do my homework, disappointing everyone around me, and being told by every adult that I was lazy, “just” needed to try harder, and wasn’t living up to my potential.

I’ll be working on the resulting shame and anxiety for the rest of my life.²

If someone tells me, “Remember to pick up the dry cleaning tomorrow,” I definitely won’t remember.

If someone tells me, “Remember to put the laundry in the dryer in ten minutes,” I probably won’t even remember that.

If you’re thinking, “It’s just ten minutes! Nobody can possibly forget that,” I have made an app that’s probably not for you.

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Computers saved me.

Despite constantly being told that I’d never get a good job, computers provided a lucrative career path filled with even worse academic performers who couldn’t care less about my grades. What a stroke of luck! I’d be mediocre to terrible at most jobs, but I turned out to be very good at using computers to turn coffee and Phish into money.

But computers also save me in smaller, everyday ways.

They help me remember.

*     *     *

Sorry, I just had to go put the laundry in the dryer, which I had forgotten.

Really. It’s that bad.

*     *     *

Calendar alarms changed my life. Events without alarms don’t happen. (If you’re thinking, “Why doesn’t he just check his calendar?” I have made an app that’s probably not for you.)

I had less success with reminders until we had ubiquitous voice capture.

If I think of something at inconvenient times, like while driving or exercising, I need to capture it immediately or I’ll forget. It cannot wait until I get to my phone or computer. It has to be recorded right then or it’s gone.

Siri, for all of its faults, has always been very good at creating tasks in Apple’s Reminders app — and Siri is everywhere. Computer. Phone. Car. Watch. I can almost always ask Siri to add something to Reminders.

So Reminders’ integration and ubiquity are invaluable to me.

The Reminders app, though, doesn’t fit me at all. I don’t like how it looks, how it works, or how it’s organized. Hell, I don’t even like its icon. There’s nothing about it I like. So I never open it. (Not as if I’d ever remember to check it anyway.)³

Most of my Reminders interaction has always been via Siri and notifications. And that fits me very well, with three major exceptions:

1. If I say “Remind me to buy milk,” but I forget to specify a time (or Siri misses it), Reminders will never notify me, and I’ll never check the app, so it’ll be lost.
2. If I inadvertently dismiss a Reminders notification without snoozing it, Reminders will never notify me about it again, so it’ll be lost.
3. When I do snooze a Reminders notification, which I do a lot, the snooze options suck.⁴

This spring, I made myself an app to fix all three, and… it escalated.

I’ve been using it for months, and it has profoundly improved my life. Today, I’m releasing it, in hopes that maybe it can help other people, too.

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Introducing Unforgetful.

The concept is simple: Reminders for ADHD.

This means:

• It’s impossible to lose a task. Notifications always repeat, even if you miss or dismiss them, until the task is completed or deleted.
• Designed for procrastination. Snoozing is a core feature, with thoughtful intervals that scale as you snooze a task more.
• Nothing is hidden away. A hidden task is a forgotten task. No folders, no tags, no organization, no different views or modes.
• No judgment or shame. Nothing is overdue. You’re not in trouble. Everything is either due now or in the future. Didn’t get to it today? Maybe tomorrow. Every day is a fresh start.

And Unforgetful does all of that with your Reminders data. That means:

• Siri works perfectly, everywhere. Just say “Remind me…” without having to specify an app.
• It replaces your Reminders notifications. Turn them off, turn these on.
• No import. This isn’t a new system to learn or migrate into. Your Reminders data is just… there.
• No export. If you try Unforgetful and it’s not for you, just delete it and turn Reminders notifications back on, and all of your data is right there in Reminders.
• Mix and match. Don’t like it everywhere? You can still use Reminders on your Vision Pro or whatever, or simultaneously use Unforgetful with Reminders or any other app that uses Reminders data.

I’ve optimized lots of features and details for ADHD, too:

• Fast capture with dictation. Tap the microphone button in Unforgetful — or its full suite of widgets, or its Lock Screen or Control Center controls — and quickly dictate a task.⁵
• Spaced-out notifications, not an overwhelming pile at once. If multiple tasks are set to alert you at the same time, they space themselves out so you’re not barraged with a hopeless stack of obligations. And the order changes every day, so nothing gets lost between things.
• Recurring-task backlogs don’t pile up. If you miss multiple intervals for a recurring task, completing it doesn’t make you click through all of your past failures to get to the present day… it just schedules the next one from now.
• Remind me 5 minutes after I get home. Location-based reminders can notify you after a set delay. Because if a “remind me when I get home” task fires as I pull into the driveway, I’ll forget it by the time I’m inside, unloaded, and ready to do anything about it.

Unforgetful is a Mac and iOS app that’s $19.99 per year (US). One subscription buys all platforms.

There’s a one-month free trial so you can really live with it and see if it’s right for you before paying.

There are a million task-management apps. Unforgetful is not for everyone, but it’s really for me, far more than anything else has ever been.

Frankly, I have no idea how to reach the other people it’s for.

But I know you’re out there.

If any of this resonates with you… give it a shot.